In the world of video games, difficulty can be a virtue in itself. A game like Angry Birds is just difficult enough to be diverting—and, as a result, only fit for “casual” gamers. Real gamers are like real art lovers. They demand extraordinary difficulty.

Right now, the most difficult game you can play is called English Country Tune. It’s a confounding three-dimensional puzzle game, available on the iPad, iPhone, Mac, and PC, which has set a new bar for difficulty. EDGE, the game developers’ gaming magazine, has called it “uncompromising”; playing it, they write, “involves a substantial, perhaps overwhelming, dose of maniacal bafflement.” The more mainstream PC Gamer likens it to “an entrance exam for MIT.” That doesn’t sound very fun, but the point of the game isn’t fun, exactly; it’s more like fascination. David Anton, a player who’s reviewed the game on the iTunes App Store, says it better than I ever could: “The sense of delight from solving what initially looks impossible,” he writes, “is immeasurable.”

Many games make a fetish out of difficulty. So-called “bullet hell” games, like Mushihimesama Bug Panic, fill the screen with enough deadly projectiles that responding to them intentionally becomes almost impossible. Other games, like Tetris, are built on a sense of mounting difficulty; they conjure it by limiting you to a certain quantity of space, which you must constantly clear of debris. Statistics-driven games, such as the widely acclaimed Infinity Blade, ask players to “grind,” repeating the same battles over and over at ever-increasing levels of difficulty, like weightlifters working out at a gym. And some games are so hard that they turn difficulty into a nearly aesthetic experience: The Impossible Game, by the developer FlukeDude, is so impossible that playing it becomes absurdly, even heroically pointless. It’s an iPhone-sized embodiment of Beckett’s famous exhortation: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

In most of these games, you can overcome the difficulty through a combination of practice and persistence. Not so in English Country Tune, which offers up an unusually abstract and mathematical kind of difficulty. The game unfolds on a three-dimensional shape, which is floating in space and built up out of stacked cubes. (Many levels look like floating ziggurats or parking garages.) You control a small blue paddle which flips from one cube-surface to another; you can flip the paddle to motor along the surface of the shape by swiping with one finger, or rotate the shape using two.

Using this basic setup, the game presents you with an ever-evolving variety of puzzles. There are no time limits, and no instructions—you have as long as you want to figure things out intuitively. The genius of the game is that few of the puzzles have analogues in the real, physical world. You’re not dodging bullets, jumping between platforms, or stacking blocks in a bin. Instead, you must figure out how to maneuver small spheres, called “larvae,” into little boxes, by taking advantage of the fact that the force of gravity is not absolute but relative to the direction in which your paddle is moving. (By paddling a sphere from different directions, you can change the gravity that applies to it.)

On other levels, when your paddle leaves a surface, a little shrub springs up; you must completely cover all sides of the three-dimensional shape in these shrubs. (Corners are a challenge, as is the elusive final shrub.) Sometimes these puzzles are layered over one another in combination. A ridiculously difficult later level is based on the shrub premise, but requires you to design a three-dimensional shape of your own which, when covered, will fully “insulate” a still larger shape. This goal wasn’t explained; when I figured out what the game was asking me to do, I felt actual disbelief—the kind you feel when, after you’ve tested out of regular math, your teacher hands you your first real, advanced math test. “You can’t be serious,” you think. But English Country Tune is very, very serious; it wants you to think like a mathematician, to feel your way forward with instincts about spatial relationships which you didn’t know you had.

On console gaming systems like the PlayStation 3, developers are outdoing themselves to create ever more lavish, “Avatar”-like experiences. English Country Tune’s developer, an Englishman named Stephen Lavelle, has taken the opposite approach. English Country Tune makes no concessions to conventional ideas of video-game beauty. The colors clash; the font is deliberately ugly; the soundtrack is ambient and unsettling; as the shrubs spring up, they make discordant little bleeps. It’s as if Lavelle took the look of Tetris and brought it to its logical conclusion, which, it turns out, is the video-game equivalent of architectural Brutalism. I gave the game to a friend, Mike Mitchell, who’s an architect. “You really get in the zone when the patterns come into focus,” he told me, but “I’m not sure how long I’d want to spend in this environment. It’s very austere.”

Lavelle, who is a genuine auteur of the puzzle game, clearly enjoys the purity created by English Country Tune’s austerity: if you’re going to play it, it will be for the ideas, not for the pretty colors or fun music. (In interviews, he’s expressed admiration for SpaceChem, another brilliant game which is, if it’s possible, even more austere: it’s about synthesizing chemical compounds, and its interface is essentially a flowchart.) But, as its name suggests, English Country Tune is a little self-consciously confrontational, too.

Lavelle develops games under the label Increpare, and, over the past several years, he’s posted a hundred and seventy-one games to the Increpare Web site. (The most recent game was posted on February 26th.) All of them are challenging and ingenious, and many are mordantly funny. In one, Snowdrift, you play a little boy sent out to collect firewood by your parents; it starts to get dark, and you have to find your way back, blinded by snow, to the family cabin before you freeze to death. After you die, you can “click to begin” again. Another game, Queue, is entirely text-based. You play a young, impoverished artist waiting in line to apply for welfare. When you arrive, the number 156 is displayed at the top of the screen; you must wait several minutes until your number, 188, comes up. Throughout, you are harassed by talkative neighbors and intrusive security guards who want to know if that’s your bag under the seat. When an employee at the welfare center asks, “Are you unemployed as well?,” you press X to say yes.

These games are more narrative than English Country Tune. But English Country Tune shares with Lavelle’s other games a sense of timing and progression, and, in its own way, a sense of humor. There’s genuine artfulness and sensitivity in the way its new puzzles are always just beyond your reach; Lavelle shows how spatial ideas can surprise, just like narrative ones. And there’s even a humor in the game’s austerity. Who knew, it seems to ask, that your mind could be at home in such strange places?