It’s hard to describe, admittedly, because there’s absolutely nothing else like it.

It’s a bizarre combination of Super Puzzle Fighter- SPL-T is a falling-block game of sorts, one in which some puzzle pieces have countdown-timers so that they eventually ‘zero out’ and vanish-crossed with that grade-school game where you try to see if you can fold a sheet of paper in half more than eight times. Simogo’s SPL-T is a minimalist revelation of a puzzle game. Flappy Bird wouldn’t have become the short-lived smash that it was if it wasn’t doing something right at its core, and even though its difficulty could be capricious and unforgiving, it was still capable of sinking its hooks deep into the player’s brain and spurring them on to one more try, again and again and again.- Garrett Martin So its massive success, which was weirdly delayed over a year after its release, might’ve been spawned through some digital shenanigans. Brough’s been one of the most talented and consistent mobile game designers for years, and he continues his streak with Cinco Paus.- Garrett Martin If you’re familiar with Brough’s previous games 868-HACK and Imbroglio, you already sort of know what to expect. Michael Brough’s game from late 2017 is once again built around chance and skill, with ever-changing levels and tools preventing you from relying on memorization and familiarity. Ziggurat has a great knack for creating itches and then permitting you to scratch them, if you can.- Joe Bernardi Even in a short burst of play, it’s pretty easy to discover a permutation of the action that had previously gone unnoticed. Keeping the action set minimal while providing a wide variety of gameplay situations forces the player to get creative. Like most good iOS games, it’s defined by an extremely focused shallowness, targeted entirely towards getting you to dive back in.

The one-finger shoot-‘em-up Ziggurat‘s unique greatness only becomes clear once you get sort of good at it. A fusion of the match-3, RPG and endless runner genres, 10000000 employs a surprisingly effective combination of common mechanics to keep players coming back.- J.P. Fortunately, the strange hybrid 10000000 has several. And on that last point, ELOH’s painted artwork makes it one of the most beautiful games I’ve seen in years.- Garrett MartinĪt this point, match-3 games are like zombie games: There’d better be a damned good hook if you want me to pay attention. It has everything I’m looking for in a mobile game: a simple concept that makes smart use of the touchscreen, action that grows increasingly more complicated, and charming art and music. Each ball makes a sound when it hits a block, creating a steady rhythm once everything’s in the right place. The goal is to shift blocks into the right position to bounce balls towards the target. ELOHĮLOH’s another gorgeous puzzle game perfectly calibrated for touchscreens. Here are Paste’s picks for the best mobile games of the 2010s. We’re not here to point out what’s wrong with mobile games, though, but to highlight the games that made this decade the artistic and commercial boom period that it was for mobile games. Yes, too much of this market is underpinned with microtransactions and free-to-play shenanigans, but the recently launched Apple Arcade subscription service will hopefully minimize those exploitative tactics.

The best mobile games combine the pick-up-and-play ease of smartphones with elegant design and the kind of magnetic gameplay loop that keeps you enthralled far longer than you ever expected. Sometimes that could result in creative dead ends-early this decade some designers spent too much time showing what mobile games could do, rather than exploring and building on what they should do. As console games became more and more beholden to digital distribution, and smartphones became both omnipresent and more powerful, it became harder to draw a distinction between the two. The genre came into its own over the last ten years, both creatively and commercially, with the walls between mobile games and the traditional gaming market collapsing as time wore on. Mobile games weren’t born this decade, but this was still the mobile decade.

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