Yeah this is without question my most played at this point.
I actually don't have any other games on my phone right now, huh.
I dunno if you do them solo or with your partner, but we’ve turned them into a couple’s exercise. If you have an iPhone and a tv/streaming box that accepts AirPlay, the NYT app will expand out on a tv to fit the 16x9 dimensions (though it can be finicky, sometimes I have to try a half dozen times before it expands vs just sharing my screen). I just have to check myself to not dominate the fills, because it’s much less fun just to watch someone fill in words when you just needed a couple more seconds to think of the answer.
I was scrolling through my Apple app store history, and found a bunch of games that I want to revisit:
A Dark Room - I remember this as part interactive fiction, part RPG, part clicker type design. It definitely scratched the itch of making numbers go up, but had some fun writing to back it up.
Square Enix's GO series (Hitman, Lara Croft, Deus Ex) are board game puzzlers with licensed characters. They remind me of if Eric Chahi's Another World/Out of This World were turn based, and on a grid.
Year Walk and
Device 6 are adventure games from the same developer. YW's horror based, had a Blair Witch vibe IIRC, and Device 6 did a ton with text, formatting, and just playing with the medium of being on a mobile device.
SPL-T is from the same dev, and is a straight puzzle game. It hits similar to Threes, but more minimal. You have to keep splitting (hence the name) the screen into smaller sections, which all have timers on how many turns it takes for them to disappear and open up more space to make splits. Tough to describe, but a mentally challenging game, moreso than Threes to me.
Pinball Arcade - this developer used to have the license to all the Bally/Midway/Williams actual cabinets, and would recreate everything about those systems. Unfortunately, whoever owns Bally/Midway/Williams now decided that Zen Pinball should make those games instead, so now they're stuck with just Gottleib and Stern games, which are fine, but don't have the same draw as the others.
Super Hexagon is the most stressful zone game I've played. I've still never beaten the first 60 second run, but I did get to about 45 seconds once, and the adrenaline was
pumping.
Rolando was an early mobile puzzle game that had more than a little inspiration from LocoRoco, the PSP game about rolling jelly creatures around a 2d maze. Like so many early iOS games, the original doesn't work after Apple cut 32-bit support, but the devs did a re-release a few years ago, so I'm going to buy that now.
EDGE is a Block Puzzle, in as far as you are a block, and you have to move yourself around a puzzle. Touch physics were spot on, and the game had a unique isometric perspective and good soundtrack.
