The best new Android game
Balatro
More addictive than crack cocaine (or so I’m told), this deceptively pared-back deck builder reinterprets the simple game of poker into a head-scratching roguelite puzzler that’ll keep you playing long after your phone has thrown in the towel and begged you to activate its battery saver mode. Having torn up the PC, Mac and console world in early 2024, now it’s been squeezed down into mobile form. Good luck getting any work done once it’s installed.
Download Balatro (.99/£9.99)
Endless runners
ALONE…
Somewhere along the way, a great many games forgot how to be exciting. But ALONE… remembers those days of seat-of-the-pants roller-coaster gameplay, where a moment’s distraction spelled game over. Here, you’re piloting a tiny ship through deadly caverns at breakneck speed. Occasionally, alarms blare, to warn of incoming projectiles. All you have is your wits and reactions as your sliding finger directs the ship up and down, before it inevitably comes a cropper on the rocky face of one too many giant asteroids. There’s no depth here, but there doesn’t need to be — ALONE… has tons of replay value simply by virtue of being relentlessly thrilling, no matter how many times you play.
Download ALONE… (.49/£1.19)
PinOut
Pinball reinvented as an endless runner of sorts, PinOut has you smash a ball ever onwards while a timer relentlessly counts down. The table is essentially a huge neon corridor, punctuated by ramps and flippers. Each section is a miniature table – a puzzle you must quickly grok, before making the perfect shot to send the ball to the next challenge. It’s immediate but tense. Bonuses and mini-games help replenish the timer, but a few duff shots can leave you struggling on entering later, tougher zones. For .99/£2.69, you can buy permanent checkpoint restarts; for free, you’ll have to play through to the end in a single sitting – a tall order, even for (virtual) pinball wizards.
Download PinOut (.99/£2.69)
Summer Catchers
Endless runners typically have you tap the screen to leap over hazards. Summer Catchers instead has the protagonist pack a bag full of power-ups that you trigger at opportune moments, for example to smash through walls or get a speed boost to escape a foe. With three slots available at any given time, this should be simple. It’s not. Split-second decision making infuses Summer Catchers with tension and excitement as you juggle your limited inventory and try very hard to not press the wrong buttons. Immediately, it’s clear helping the protagonist reach new lands won’t be easy – but you’ll want to try.
Download Summer Catchers (.99/£3.99)
Arcade games
INKS
Pinball is known for metal balls spanging about at absurd speed. INKS subverts the basic idea by transforming pinball into an almost serene, meditative experience. Each simple table provides you with a few coloured targets. Hit them and paint explodes everywhere. Your ball’s subsequent journey is then detailed by way of arcing coloured lines. Strike all the targets and a final goal appears, to drop the ball into. This in itself proves compelling. But optional shot targets give INKS an additional level, transforming the game into a puzzle as you figure out which tiny handful of precision shots completes a table – and then challenging you to execute your plan.
Download INKS (.99/£2.79)
Forget-Me-Not
This one feels like someone mashed-up the best bits from classic arcade games and squeezed the result into your Android device. Your little square scoots about neon mazes, shooting, eating flowers, and trying to grab a key to unlock a hitherto hidden exit. Meanwhile, enemies periodically beam in and start wrecking the place. Some pursue you with all the determination of the most fervent Pac-Man ghost, but most of Forget-Me-Not’s denizens are perfectly content kicking seven shades out of each other. Games often involve trying to negotiate the destruction occurring all around you, grab lurking bonuses, and somehow escape intact. It’s breezy, intense and brilliant. Many titles evoke the feel and fun of retro games, but Forget-Me-Not is a rare example that equals the very best. With randomised mazes and several modes, it’ll keep any fan of old-school gaming grinning for weeks.
Download Forget-Me-Not (.99/£3.59)
Drop Wizard
Classic arcade games and slippy touchscreens rarely gel. But Drop Wizard has been cleverly reimagined for smartphones. The set-up echoes single-screen platform classics Bubble Bobble and Snow Bros, having you dart about, giving roaming enemies a kicking. The twist: this magician can’t stop running. The lack of full control or even a jump button initially confounds. But by limiting you to sprinting left and right, carefully timing leaps to blast magic upon landing, mastery depends on cracking each level’s choreography. It’s a pitch-perfect mix of old and new.
Download Drop Wizard (.99/£2.99)
Giant Dancing Plushies
Imagine a Godzilla movie. But instead of an angry giant lizard chaotically smashing up a city, the kaiju had style. And rhythm. And scruples. And was a stuffed toy. That’s Giant Dancing Plushies. You control the giant cuddly, stomping along to the beat in a surreal mash-up of rhythm action and real-time strategy. Because these cuddlies care, you can only stomp on bad guys shooting at you. And because they’re auditioning for Giant Plushy Strictly (probably), you need to move on the beat to get big points. Gain enough XP and you unlock new plushies, cities and combos, adding a dash of Street Fighter II to the mix. Ish. You’re bound to think it grin-inducing fun – unless you’re the monster.
Download Giant Dancing Plushies (.99/£3.99)
Jumpgrid
Carve off bits of Pac-Man and Frogger, shove them inside a shoebox, and then glue on the psychotic beating heart of Super Hexagon and that’s Jumpgrid. This game invites you to leap from point to point on a three-by-three grid, munching cubes, before disappearing into a wormhole. The snag is all the whirling shapes of death destined to smash your teeth out. This is a game of patterns. Like Super Hexagon, you will fail often and it will be all your fault for having digits that aren’t as dextrous as you’d imagined. But when you’re in the zone, there’s nothing quite like the thrillride of a solid run in Jumpgrid, as you dart around, nodding to the beat, one step ahead of pirouetting neon slices of doom.
Download Jumpgrid (.99/£2.89)
pureya
There are major WarioWare vibes on firing up pureya, which revels in hurling vibrant arcade titles your way for precisely ten seconds, before it has you play something else. Two massive arrow buttons are all you need to play, whether directing an eagle to not painfully fly into cliffs or having a ball bounce over cacti. The aim is to grab as many marbles across each 90-second nine-game roller-coaster, before lobbing them into a pachinko machine that awards prizes ranging from character clobber to entirely new games. As an added bonus, unlocked games can individually be played in endless mode. Barg.
Download pureya (.99/£3.99)
Super Monsters Ate My Condo
The idea of classic mobile games might seem laughable, but there are as many years between the time of writing and Condo’s original release as between Condo and The Sims. But like the best classic games on PC and console, Condo remains compelling – along with still being reassuringly bonkers. At its core, it’s a colour-matching game – but you’re swiping colourful apartment block floors into the gaping maws of cartoon kaiju, while attempting to match groups of three in the main column. Manage those matches and you fashion metal floors that when fed to the beasts unleash oddball power-ups. It’s all very strange and played at breakneck pace. Ideal fodder if you’ve a hankering for Jenga meets Bejeweled in fast-forward with more than a dash of lunacy.
Download Super Monsters Ate My Condo (free or .99/£7.99 IAP)
Shooting games
20 Minutes Till Dawn
Usually, ‘20 minutes till dawn’ means grumbling about having woken up too early – and then getting more shut-eye. For this game’s hero, things are different. They’re stuck in a gloomy forest, with an endless horde of Lovecraftian monsters moving in for the kill. Fortunately, you’re armed – initially with a shotgun, but grab gems dropped by felled foes and you work your way through a levelling-up tree. Depending on your character, this might give you a fire-breathing dragon or knives you can lob around like a crazed ninja. Whether you’ll make it till dawn is another matter. Even in the ten-minute mode, that’s a stretch. But 20 minutes provides enough tension and monsters to make you want to hide under the covers until the actual dawn appears.
Download 20 Minutes Till Dawn (.99/£4.69)
M.Duck
There aren’t many games where we’d say the control system is a bit of a nightmare and consider that a recommendation of sorts. In fact, M.Duck might be the sole example, but its awkwardness transforms a single-screen gallery shooter into a relentlessly tense risk vs. reward blaster. The premise involves the titular mallard climbing a tower to stop it shining a light on his pond at night. (The council never does anything about awful neighbours.) The thing is, you can’t move and shoot at the same time, and must therefore keep switching between ducking (oho!) out of the way of enemy fire and giving them a quacking salvo of your own. Top stuff, not least with procedurally generated levels and upgrades that keep things fresh no matter how many times you play.
Download M.Duck (.99/£1.49)
Death Road to Canada
Described by its creators as a ‘randomly generated road-trip action-RPG’, Death Road to Canada has the heart of an arena shooter. More often than not, your little gang of looters – aiming to get from Florida to the reportedly zombie-free Canada – find themselves surrounded, weaving between the bitey and sometimes surprisingly spry undead, occasionally shooting them in the face. It’s relentlessly intense, whether you’re trying to sneak about a city at sunrise, or find yourself in a survival-based siege. And even moments of respite are nervy affairs, as you tackle pages seemingly torn from a sadistic Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the wrong decision can leave the last of your party gouged to death by an angry moose.
Download Dead Road to Canada (.99/£9.99)
holedown
In holedown, you traverse your way towards planet cores by using projectiles that like nothing better than bouncing around while grinning inanely. As they boing about, the blocks they hit are gradually depleted, enabling you to dig further down. It’s a similar premise to a bunch of Android freebies, but holedown is a properly polished and premium effort. There are no ads, and no constant nudges to splash out on IAPs. Instead, there’s ongoing progression to reward your efforts; reaching a high-score is therefore down to your amazing aim (or flukey rebound shots) rather than digging deep into your wallet.
Download holedown (.99/£3.39)
Jydge
In the city of Edenbyrg, where the letter U has seemingly been made illegal, it’s time to send in the Jydge. This cybernetic law-enforcer isn’t so hot on wigs. Also, its gavel isn’t a tiny ceremonial hammer – it’s instead a massive firearm. The titular robot hero’s not terribly fussed about the whole ‘innocent until proven guilty’ thing either. Like Judge Dredd on auto-pilot, he blasts his way through top-down scenes, obliterating crims, freeing hostages that manage to avoid getting mown down in the crossfire, and ‘confiscating’ loot. It’s all a bit ‘leave your brain at home’, but this game’s neon larks are pulse-pounding fun.
Download Jydge (.99/£8.49)
Puzzle and match games
Ghosts and Apples
Kids: don’t poke around in old houses! At least, that appears to be the lesson here, when a youngling gets their soul trapped within a puppet and is tasked with capturing ghosts. It’s all quite jolly and Burtonesque, though, as you snare colourful ghosts and fling them at stacked columns of their cohorts. In traditional match-game fashion, the aim is to get three in a row, which duly disappear. Only there are four stacks to manage and tight time limits – tricky. The result is an exhilarating pulse-pounding match title that’s easy to grasp but hugely challenging to master.
Download Ghosts and Apples (.99/£1.69)
Baba Is You
A sliding puzzle game? Yawn. But wait, because Baba Is You is brilliant. And it’s brilliant because it invites you to constantly break the game’s rules, which messes with your head. The rules are outlined on screen as blocks you can shove. Sentences create conditions and those conditions can upend the game. Can’t get to the win flag? Remove ‘Stop’ from the end of ‘Wall Is Stop’ and you can walk through walls. Easy! Only it isn’t, because Baba Is You counters your potential trickery by way of deviously complex puzzles that require serious brainpower and experimentation to overcome. Fortunately, the touchscreen controls are perfectly judged – as is the game as a whole, ensuring you’ll refuse to give in, even when ‘Player Is Stumped’.
Download Baba Is You (.99/£5.06)
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
It’s not often you launch a game only for it to insist that there is no game, and that you should go and do something else instead. Having just spent a fiver, you might decide otherwise and start poking around. Via a deft mix of prodding, swiping and shaking your device, things start happening – weird things. To say precisely what these weird things are would erode the game’s surprises, which are frequent and grin-inducing. Suffice to say that a combination of a perfectly executed script, clever riffs on gaming, and genuinely smart puzzles, make for an Android classic that’s nothing short of unmissable. If you don’t buy and enjoy this one, There Is No Hope (for you).
Download There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (.99/£4.19)
Gorogoa
Gorogoa is a game that messes with your head – and any sense of time and place you might assume would stay put in a four-by-four grid of animated comic book panels. That’s because these panels can be manipulated and overlaid, to create new pathways through a wordless story packed full of mystery and beauty. Naturally, this works best on a larger display, but even on a decent-sized Android blower, Gorogoa has the gaming chops to smack your brains in, massage your imagination, and in a few key set pieces, give your arcade smarts and dexterity a stern test. Top-notch stuff.
Download Gorogoa (.99/£4.89)
Railroad Ink Challenge
Board games bang on and are rarely fun to play alone. Railroad Ink Challenge is different, marrying brevity and a first-rate single-player challenge that’s endlessly replayable. Across seven rounds, you roll dice to select route pieces. These are duly connected to points at the edge of the board. By connecting roads and railway lines, you ramp up your score. The game’s further complicated by way of bonuses and special tiles like factories and universities. Your first few goes will meet with bafflement, but once it clicks, Railroad Ink Challenge is a board game puzzler you can squeeze into an odd five-minutes – but that can also keep you chuffed well into the wee small hours, trying to improve your high score.
Download Railroad Ink Challenge (.99/£3.99)
unmemory
For a game that starts off looking like a conventional illustrated book – albeit one with one long scrolling page per chapter – unmemory wryly plays with convention to the point it gives your brain whiplash. It all clicks when you hear a distant phone, realise you spotted one earlier, scroll upwards and answer it. At that point, you realise the entire scrolling pane is an interconnected net of puzzles – a narrative book-like spin on the room escape genre. It’s a game that gleefully thrives in the grey area between mediums, playing with the very nature of what narrative text, interactive puzzles and videogames can be.
Download unmemory (.99/£5.99)
Adventure, story and sandbox games
The Room: Old Sins
An engineer and his wife disappear, and their trail leads to
