This week sees the launch of Road Not Taken onto the App Store, a simple puzzle game that's simultaneously full of beauty and mystery.
Perhaps surprisingly, such a combination of elements isn't wholly unique on Apple's dazzlingly well-stocked App Store. There's a good bunch of iOS games out there that manage to tickle your brain, bathe your eyes, and tempt your curiosity all at once.
Here are six of them, starting with the Spry Fox's new entrant itself.
Spry Fox has already made a name for itself in the puzzle game department with the innovative Triple Town, but Road Not Taken is another kettle of fish entirely. It might look like another clever grid-based block-shifter, but stir in some Robert Frost poetry and a "pointillist" approach to narrative, and you have something quite different.
Ustwo's Monument Valley might have been a runaway success, but it's about as far from mainstream hits like Crossy Road and Pokemon GO as you can get. First, there's its gently taxing spatial puzzles that play with perspective like an Escher drawing. Then there's the strange world it's set in, complete with squawking crow-people and an enigmatic princess named Ida.
Whether you're talking about puzzle intricacy or spooky mystery, there are few better than The Room series. The third game brings yet more elaborate locked-box puzzles, each of which are pleasingly tactile tests of memory and lateral thinking, and expands them over multiple rooms. The story is yet more spine-tingly brilliance.
It's not a pure puzzler like most of the rest of the games in this feature, but Year Walk essentially hides a bunch of escape-the-room logic puzzles within its weird adventure shell. And boy is it weird. Year Walk is undoubtedly the most mysterious, quietly unsettling game you can play on mobile, with arcane symbols and spooky dolls and creepy animal-people.
Like a streamlined Lemmings, Kiwanuka has you forming living bridges out of a posse of minions. Combine this slightly odd and even unsettling mechanic with a stylishly abstract art style, and you have a puzzler with a bit of an edge.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP
Like Year Walk, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP hides its puzzles and riddles in an adventure-lite shell. But it's all about that beautiful pseudo-retro art style and alluringly cryptic narrative - such as it is. Being confused in an iOS game has rarely been this beguiling.
