Assemble With Care

The creators of the legendary Monument Valley show up to Apple Arcade with something a bit more intimate. Assemble with Care tells the story of Maria, a traveling antique restorer, who explores the personal lives of the people of a small town while putting their possessions back together. The gameplay sees Maria unscrewing, connecting, gluing, and assembling a series of objects, starting off simply and getting more complex as the game progresses. It’s a melancholy adventure in stuff repair.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Card of Darkness

The prolific mobile developer Zach Gage offers a bedeviling game for Apple Arcade. You’ve got a grid full of stacks of cards and the need to remove them so you can move through the grid to an exit. Cards can be helpful or harmful. They might give you a sword or a spell to attack enemies or might be one of a menagerie of foes whose distinct behaviors pose challenges to your meager pool of health points. Clear stacks of cards to clear paths, while dealing with the pros and cons of each card. Half the strategy is deciding whether to clear a given stack—there might be good stuff in there—or ignore it, since it might be too full of enemies. There are twists, the main one being that your weapons and the enemies all have damage numbers associated with them, and attacking an even-numbered enemy with an odd-numbered sword (or vice versa) will break it. The art is by Adventure Time’s Pendleton Ward.

Cardpocalypse

A treat for trading card game fans, Versus Evil’s Cardpocalypse is a hand-drawn take on Hearthstone-style battles. Cards and rules change as the game progresses, and the story is a charming school-based affair with a young wheelchair-bound protagonist. Like many Apple Arcade games, this one will be on PC soon as well.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Cricket Through the Ages

Cricket Through the Ages is a comprehensive history of the sport of cricket, from the days of cavemen and dinosaurs to the far future. It’s also a wonderfully silly showcase of wonky physics framed as a completely serious documentary.

Earthnight

Yes, we’re using a Nintendo Switch trailer to showcase Earthlight, because it was in a Nintendo Indie Game Direct that Cleaversoft’s dragon apocalypse action game first caught our eye. Heroes Sydney and Stanley skydive through the stratosphere, landing on the backs of dragons and running to their heads for the kill. The music is a gorgeous mix of chiptune and traditional tracks. The art style makes the game feel like a playable prog-rock album cover. Imagine killing dragons.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Frogger in Toy Town

The folks at Q-Games can be relied on to make games look great, sound great, and play weird. Check their stellar catalogue of PixelJunk games for reference, or observe what they’ve done with the classic Frogger for Apple Arcade. They’ve given your frog the challenge of crossing floors full of motorized toys, propped-up books, and rolling balls, all operating with realistic physics. A trippy soundtrack and the added challenge of collecting little frogs helps make the most familiar of games interesting once more.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Grindstone

What more can be done with tile-matching games? Capybara demonstrates with Grindstone, a hack-and-slash puzzle battler. Our bloodthirsty hero traces paths through color-coded creatures, using stones to link attacks together and keep combos going. It’s got treasure and crafting and all sorts of goodness, wrapped up with a cool animated style.

Mini Motorways

One of our favorite mobile games of all time is Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Metro. It challenged players to connect an ever-expanding map of train stations with subway lines for as long as possible without making its virtual commuters irate. The dev team is back with Mini Motorways which features levels sprouting with houses and parking garages, while challenging players to lay down roads, bridges, traffic lights and more. It is Mini Metro with more wrinkles, which means it’s great.

Oceanhorn 2

Oceanhorn 2, sequel to the award-winning Zelda-like Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas, was announced way back in 2016. The original was a top-down action RPG with stunning visuals. This one is a third-person action RPG with stunning visuals. Play this one with a gamepad for best results.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Outlanders

This very pretty town-building strategy game challenges plays to resolve small societal challenges while figuring out where to construct houses, sawmills and the like. It’s broken up into missions, each involving a new town, its leader, and some goals for the community. At first it seems easy, but then you’ll realize you didn’t stock up on enough food and everyone’s dead. Plan better and try again.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Shinsekai: Into the Depths

This one is a stunner. The Capcom-developed adventure is an underwater riff not just on Metroid games in general but on Metroid II, the Game Boy and 3DS adventure that had heroine Samus Aran gradually lower the level of poisonous liquid in a network of caverns so she could explore ever deeper down. In Shinsekai, we control a deep sea diver who can gradually upgrade their suit to survive more dangerous depths.

Advertisement

There are many Metroid-style trappings, what with the caverns to explore and the upgrades to collect, but Shinsekai exhibits a wonderful identity of its own. Its environment is a mix of underwater sci-fi (upgrade rooms shaped like nautilus shells, for example) and deep-sea disaster (an area full of sunken, junked cars, a collapsing ice cavern, and more). Dangerous sea life swims through the caverns you explore, attracted to your headlamp if you turn it on to detect the hidden gems needed for upgrades. Weapons consist of things like harpoons, and involve such distinct actions as reeling in one enemy to inject it with something that makes it bait to attract other nearby enemies. This is among the Apple Arcade games that’d feel natural on any traditional gaming platform.

Skate City

Snowman, the studio behind the outstanding Alto’s Adventure series of endless snowboarding games, applies its talent for creating moody, atmospheric motion to the skateboarding genre. Free skate or take on challenges to unlock new courses. Skate City is a stunning 2D game with seemingly endless replayability.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Sonic Racing

Surprise, it’s a new Sonic Racing game! Loosely based on the recently-released Team Sonic Racing, players race as a member of a three-character team in short, bite-sized races, winning trophies and earning coins to unlock new power-ups.It’s an excellent example of a game that would be packed with microtransactions if it weren’t on Apple Arcade.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Spidersaurs

Only in a wacky 2D platform shooter from Wayforward would science ever dream of combining spiders and dinosaurs. Spidersaurus plays like classic Contra, only instead of aliens we’re fighting bad science and instead of commandos we’re a gung-ho police officer and a punk rock girl. This is Wayforward’s second Apple Arcade game, the first being chapter one of the latest Shantae game, which is also quite good.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Tint

Lykke Studios’ Tint is a tranquil puzzle game about blending watercolors to create different hues. It’s the sort of game best enjoyed with the lights turned down low and a glass of wine on standby.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Various Daylife

Various Daylife is complicated. From the Square Enix team responsible for Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler, it’s a combination of turn-based role-playing game and time-management sim. The player character divides his time between performing off-screen jobs to earn money for equipment and upgrades and going on more involved missions with a party of adventurers. Quests involve the party moving automatically across the screen as a meter fills, facing off against monsters in random turn-based encounters. When the meter is full, the quest is complete. It’s perfect for playing in short sessions. Those hoping for a more traditional RPG experience will be confused, but possibly delighted.

Advertisement
Image for article titled Apple Arcade Is Mobile Gaming Without All The Bullshit

Word Laces / Dear Reader / Patterned

There are some really chill games on Apple Arcade, including a few of intriguing puzzles. Word Laces has you tie clumps of letters together to make words. Dear Reader has you filling in the blanks from passages in an ever-expanding library of literary classics. So far, the most pleasant of all of these games is Patterned, which is a simple jigsaw game that involves placing pieces onto a board to fill out a repeating pattern.