Hottest new iOS games

Regardless of whether you want sword-slinging or mud-flinging, these games will do the trick. Leif Johnson reports

By far the biggest new title this month is TheElder Scrolls:Blades, which is Bethesda Softworks’ long-awaited iPhone game. It’s cool, though some players are feeling more stabbed by the payment model than by the swords. Fortunately, we found other flowers in the field. There’s a pendulum game that manages to feel so right precisely because its graphics feel so wrong, and there’s a puzzle game that sometimes almost moved me to tears (in the best way).

The Elder Scrolls: Blades Price: Free from fave.co/2PsKR9G

TheElderScrolls:Blades is a fun made-for-mobile game about rebuilding your ransacked hometown and delving into dungeons where you fight baddies by using carefully timed taps for either your sword or shield. In portrait mode, you can even play it with one hand.

You’ll loot treasure, too, but you usually won’t get that Skyrim- like instant gratification when you open a treasure chest. As this is a free-to-play game, you’ll have to wait a bit before it unlocks – or, of course, you can plunk down some cash to make it open early. It feels a bit like putting gold in the chest for someone else

to loot. Still, it’s rather impressive and worth trying if you don’t mind waiting out the chests.

Rest in Pieces Price: Free from fave.co/2IJbUgr

RestinPieces is one of the best horror games on iOS in a while, which is remarkable because it’s also one of the simplest. It’s a pendulum game, but here the pendulum is a porcelain figure of a young girl in a yellow fisherman’s slicker. Back and forth she swings through a monochromatic nightmarescape with the help of your finger taps, hurtling past crags and demons toward a manic jester that looms above her and the surrounding landscape. If she crashes, she shatters, and

the sound never fails to hit like a scream. The game is free, but fortunately its in-app purchases aren’t going to frighten you. (In fact, it lets you unlock unlimited lives and disable ads for £2.99.) Once you get into the swing of things, you’ll unlock both new figures and new stages dominated by monsters evoking everything from Medusa to a kraken.

Photographs: Puzzle Stories Price: £3.99 from fave.co/2IKcIlr

There’s nothing particularly novel about using puzzles to tell stories on iOS, but few games handle the concept so well as Photographs:PuzzleStories. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a diverse assortment of puzzles

presented within the framework of five different tales. At one point you follow the plight of an alchemist, and then you’ll spend some time in the shoes of a newspaper editor. The puzzles are wonderful despite their bleakness, and the puzzles always fit the theme of the narrative. One warning: it will only take you a few hours to get through all the puzzles.

Rush Rally 3 Price: £3.99 from fave.co/2L7uy3R

RushRally3 leaves plenty of other racing games in the dust. It’s neither too realistic nor too arcadey, and it complements its single-player career campaign with some entertaining multiplayer racing modes. The cars

all handle well, and I admire how it lets you switch from an in-car perspective to a bird’s-eye view.

You get all this in addition to stellar graphics for a mere £3.99, and there aren’t even any in-app purchases. If you’re looking for a rally game on iOS, it currently doesn’t get any better than this.

Marginalia Hero Price: Free from fave.co/2PEzsnD

Medieval marginalia were visually interesting diversions from the work that monks and scribes should have been doing, which basically makes them the Game ofThrones- era equivalent of video games. Marginalia Hero makes those meme-worthy images come to life in

a simple but challenging game that’s more like Guitar

Hero than anything else. A series of targets appear on a circle, and you need to tap those targets in time with a sword that moves around the perimeter like a hand on a clock. The difficulty ramps up quickly, as you’ll soon have barely a second to see the marks before they disappear. Successfully tapping all the marks allows the knight at the bottom to slay the snails and slugs, and the gold earned from your winnings lets you buy better gear – in other words, more chances to mess up. It’s best played in short bursts rather than long sessions.