Great IOS games from the past month

Enjoy a good puzzler? Then you may find something to love among this month’s drop of standout IOS games. Regardless of your preferred pace, this month’s games remind us that puzzlers work so well on the iphone because they thrive on touch controls in ways that genres like platformers and action games do not. VERY LITTLE NIGHTMARES go.macworld.com/vln

Little Nightmares left a big impact when it crept into what seemed like every gaming system apart from the Mac back in 2017, as its tense 2D stealth spawned more scares than many of its 3D cousins in the horror genre. And now, at last, that experience has made it to the iphone with Very Little Nightmares ($6.99), right down to the yellow-slickered hero who stays a step and a shadow ahead of the monsters. The main difference is that she’s now sneaking her way through a mansion rather than a scary ocean facility.

ORDIA go.macworld.com/ord

Ordia ($3.99) plays a lot like Angry Birds: Pull back on your avatar with your finger, and it fires off in the direction you aimed in. But that’s about where the similarities end. Here you’re a gloopy eye-like blob ascending through the primordial ooze, and so you do your platforming vertically rather than horizontally. Along the way, you plop over to other gloopy blobs for support and calculate catapults over spikes, until at last you break through the surface at the end of the stage—and, perhaps, to the next stage of evolution.

JUMPGRID go.macworld.com/jump

Jumpgrid ($2.99) is aptly named, as it’s about shuffling a gamepiece around a grid with swipes of your finger, all while collecting an assortment of nodes before you swipe over to the portal leading to the next level. Don’t expect to zone out, though, as Jumpgrid is frickin’ intense (although you can slow the speed if needed). The whole time you’re collecting these nodes, you’re also dodging sliding and rotating barriers, either by vaulting past them or simply staying ahead of them. You’ve got to be quick, too, as some of these can slam into you barely half a second into a round.

MAGNIBOX go.macworld.com/mbox

Magnibox ($3.99) may sound a bit like an electronics manufacturer, but it’s actually an entertaining 2D platforming puzzler featuring boxes and magnets. You spend all 160 levels tumbling a box across the screen, and then you use magnets to pull that box to various platforms until you’re able to roll through the goal. It’s simple, but it presents challenges that feel rewarding but never exasperating. Success lies in figuring out how to roll into the right position, which sometimes involves clever use of the magnets or the assorted conveyor belts and movable boxes.

SOLAR EXPLORER: NEW DAWN go.macworld.com/send

If you ever need to be reminded why the expression “It’s not exactly rocket science” exists, you should spend some time with Solar Explorer: New Dawn ($2.99). It’s worlds away from the difficulty of landing a module on a moon or another planet, but Solar Explorer’s need for arcadey precision does a good job of capturing the tension. It’s basically a modern spin on 1979’s Lunar Lander, but developer Dwarf Cavern has updated it with lovely animations for the three phases of entry—and, more grimly, a message about the need to settle on other planets once Earth starts running out of room and resources in the 2040s.