Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
A little girl visits her grandparents on an idyllic Spanish island and spends a glorious summer rescuing wildlife. That’s pretty much all you need to know about this beautiful exploration game, designed to recall carefree childhood adventures and a treat to share with your own kids.
Alto’s Odyssey
Slide, flip and trick your way through a lush desert landscape in a worthy sequel to the excellent snowboarding game, Alto’s Adventure. The “endless runner” genre is extremely familiar to mobile game players, but this is such a lush, relaxing take that it deserves your attention.
Crossy Road Castle
A compelling and very funny spin-off from the Frogger-like Crossy Road series, this time challenging up to four players to make it through an endless series of castle environments avoiding deadly traps and enemies. Beautiful design and lots of fun with friends.
Dandara: Trials of Fear +
An engrossing 2D platformer in the “metroidvania” subgenre, Dandara works brilliantly on a smartphone, where its gravity-defying “point and move” traversal mechanic feels really at home.
Fantasian
Produced by members of the Final Fantasy team, this extraordinary mobile role-playing adventure presents a luscious world via a series of intricate handcrafted dioramas. With random battles, turn-based combat and a save-the-world story, it’s everything you want from a full-size adventure, in the palm of your hand.
Grindstone
An ingenious combination of tile-matching puzzle game and turn-based battle strategy sim, Grindstone challenges players to fight their way through ascending levels of a monster-filled castle, unlocking new gear and weapons as they go. Another brilliantly designed confection from Capybara Games, creator of Sword & Sworcery and Super Time Force.
Hidden Folks +
A lovely monochrome hidden object game set in a series of busy towns that look like a quaintly European take on the Richard Scarry universe. Players need to track down specific people and objects in each location, opening doors, windows and tent flaps to reveal their targets’ hiding places. Each scene is filled with funny little interactive elements and the whole thing is bursting with character.
The Last Campfire
A gorgeous little freeform puzzle adventure from Hello Games, the creator of No Man’s Sky, The Last Campfire is set in an enchanted forest filled with lost souls who need to be guided to safety. The wide variety of puzzles, crammed with mazes, lifts and levers, give you plenty to mull over as you enjoy the gentle folkloric feel of the world.
Mutazione
A truly unique point-and-click adventure following Kai, a teenage girl who has to save the flora on a mutant-filled island, while sharing gossip with the monstrous inhabitants. The gentle pace and very mild peril give you the space and confidence to just wallow in the world and its little dramas. A wonder.
The Oregon Trail
The classic educational game of hardship and disease on the American frontier gets a clever and respectful update here. The aim is to guide a small group of adventurers across the wilderness to Oregon, avoiding starvation and disease en route. Careful planning and resource gathering are necessary, especially with the ever present threat of gaming’s ultimate end-of-level boss: dysentery.
Sayonara Wild Hearts
Imagine an interactive 1980s pop video filled with slick dance moves, cool motorcycle riders and neon-drenched cityscapes; that’s pretty much Sayonara Wild Hearts, a rhythmic music adventure offering astonishing, eye-popping sound and vision.
Skate City
Capturing the spirit of the classic Tony Hawks games, Skate City uses intuitive context-sensitive tricks, flips and jumps to make you feel like a skating superstar as you traverse the super stylised environments.
SpellTower +
One of the greatest word puzzle games ever made, SpellTower brilliantly places a familiar word discovery challenge within a Tetris-like play field, where letter tiles tumble each time you make a word. Careful planning, situational awareness and a decent vocabulary are the requirements for success – and many weeks of fun.
What the Golf?
This is golf, but not as your uncle in his Pringle jumper knows it. It’s more of a hilarious physics-based satire on the whole idea of spoiling a good walk, where your ball might become a car or a house or the course might turn into a football pitch or a kitchen. Perfectly ridiculous.
Wurdweb
Another great word game, this time a single-player variation on Scrabble, where players select words from a limited rota and then attempt to fit them on the board, ensuring they don’t build themselves into a corner. If you want a wider tactical alternative to Wordle, this is it.
