What you should play on Apple Arcade

Threes! took the mobile gaming world by storm about a decade ago — it was the original “sliding numbers” puzzle game. Because the three-person development team behind Threes! had the audacity to charge for their game, tons of lesser clones quickly followed. But Threes! is the most satisfying experience, and it’s now part of Apple Arcade.

As with most perfect mobile games, the mechanism here is extremely simple and very satisfying. You slide numbers across a four-by-four grid, trying to combine a 1 and 2 into a 3, and then combining threes to make increasingly larger numbers. Each new number greets you with a goofy catchphrase, and the game has a delightful score that never gets old. If you never tried Threes! in its heyday, this is your excuse to get sucked in.

For sheer bizarre gameplay, What the Golf? and What the Car? cannot be beat. As the names suggest, golf and racing are the base-level inspirations for these games, but things get weird immediately. The first course has you drag on the screen and then release it to hit a golf ball, but after that your projectiles could be anything from a cat that needs to knock a giant frog off his perch to an egg that you need to land in a frying pan. Truly terrible puns abound, pretty much every time you finish a level; different areas of the map also have ridiculous names (“A hole new world” is just the first I noticed while writing this up). It also pulls in all sorts of different sports to keep things fresh, so expect to find yourself “golfing” on a soccer pitch, for example.

What the Car? uses the same “anything goes” ethos, applied to getting from one end of a level to the other. Of course, you’re usually not driving something that resembles a real car — instead, your car might sprout legs and run, or strap on a rocket pack for an extra vertical boost. Or your car has a set of lawn clippers and needs to cut the grass in a yard before it can exit. In almost all cases, you’re racing the clock to get as fast a time as possible, and the game cleverly puts shortcuts in places most people wouldn’t think to look. Both games are delightful in their absurdity and have a ton of content to keep you busy.

Mini Motorways and its predecessor Mini Metro are the kinds of games that can be simultaneously chill and extremely stressful. The chill comes from developer Dinosaur Polo Club’s simple animations, bright but somehow also muted color schemes and minimalistic music and sound effects. The stress comes from the gameplay, which always ends up spiraling out of control.

In Mini Motorways, you’re tasked with building roads to connect houses and businesses and keep traffic flowing. It starts off simple enough, with a couple houses and a few different destinations, but your city keeps getting larger, there are more cars on the road and the layout that was so effective a few minutes earlier is suddenly strained. Mini Metro has a similar vibe, as you build subway lines and stations on a map vaguely resembling some of the world’s biggest cities.

Both games end when stations get too crowded, or cars aren’t able to get to and from their destinations. The last few minutes before it all comes crashing down is incredibly stressful, as you try to reorganize streets or completely change subway designs to keep up with the influx of passengers all in service of getting a higher score. But there’s an undeniable sense of calm that can happen when your subway line is just humming along, or when everyone in your city can get to the store. There’s nearly endless replay-ability here, too.

I’ve been playing Grindstone on and off since Apple Arcade launched in 2019. The puzzler does just about everything right, introducing you to the marauding viking-type Jorj who has to do battle with boards full of cute but creepy enemies. From your starting point, you can trace a bath through the baddies, cutting through ones of the same color all in one move. Make a big enough combo, and you get a grindstone — this lets you switch to another color of enemies in the same chain, making it possible to string together bigger and more complex runs across the board. To beat a level, you usually need to take down a certain number of enemies, or beat a few of the higher hit-point baddies that spawn.

That’s the core mechanic, but developer Capybara Games put a ton of variety into Grindstone. Enemies get more aggressive the longer you’re on the board — so while you can rack up a lot of loot, you might also end up in a situation you can’t escape. There are world bosses that use the mechanics of the previous levels in clever ways, tons of items you can unlock and use to even the odds and a handful of extra game modes that keep things fresh. Not to mention ridiculous outfits you can equip to give Jorj additional powers, like the Santa suit that gives you random power-ups. If you asked me the first game you should download from Apple Arcade, I’d have to recommend Grindstone.

These two games are among my favorites that ever hit the App Store. The extremely chill snowboarding (and then sandboarding) games are beautiful to look at, have excellent music and sound design and there’s a ton of variety in the ways you interact with the world. That’s despite jumping being the main mode of interaction. Once you get good air, you can start pulling tricks like backflips and grinds, and eventually unlock a tool called the wingsuit that lets you float and take flight in limited fashion. It’s the kind of game you can pick up and understand immediately that also has plenty of challenge and replayability.

Perhaps the best trick of these games is the balance between a zen-like play experience and the way that the games nudge you to get better and go further. You’ll be presented with three challenges when you start a run (collect 30 coins, travel a certain distance, do 10 backflips and so forth); once you accomplish those, you’ll level up and get three more. And they can get very challenging! If you want to chase high scores, long distances and make it all the way to level 60, feel free — but if that’s not your jam, the game is still rewarding and enjoyable to play for a few minutes or the entirety of a cross-country flight.

Sp!ng is a classic, casual puzzle game, albeit one with a ton of polish and style. In each of the hundreds of levels included, you need to move your ball-like avatar from one end of a maze to the other. But the only way to move is if you get close to an anchor point — when that happens, you tap and hold on the screen and your ball gets pulled into orbit around that anchor. Remove your finger from the screen and your ball is flung in whatever direction it would naturally go, before gravity pulls it down. The trick is to link your path between anchors to collect gems and reach the exit while avoiding traps like spike pits.

This isn’t a very elegant description, I’ll grant you, but it’s the kind of game mechanic that you can immediately grasp. It also lends itself to a wide variety of different challenges. As the game progresses, it gets trickier to grab all the gems in a level without throwing yourself into a trap. But figuring out the right path and timing for a challenging level is extremely satisfying. It’s a classic pick-up-and-play for five minutes or two hours kind of game, and there are a ton of game modes you can unlock and different ways to customize your experience. Plus, beating your friends on a leaderboard is always fun.

Monument Valley and its sequel were two of the buzziest mobile games of the last decade, and they’re all about atmosphere. The artwork, minimal story, music and gameplay all combine to give an atmosphere of serenity with an undercurrent of something unexpected waiting to burst forth.

The gameplay is all about impossible geometry, as you manipulate the world around you to get your character from one end of a level to the other.

While the first game has a vague sort of story about the central character looking for forgiveness, the sequel made things a bit more concrete. You’re playing as a mother, trying to guide your child through the mazes with you, and there are various meditations both explicit and implied throughout the game. But you don’t need to be a parent to enjoy the game’s clever puzzles and extremely chill vibes. With a third Monument Valley game finally on its way, now is a great time to catch up on the first two.

Crossy Road Castle is a quintessential platformer, designed specifically with the iPhone in mind. The game features 10 castles, each with an “infinite” number of levels (though things start getting remixed and recycled after level 100 or so). The game was built with the common portrait orientation of smartphones as the only experience, so levels typically involve a fair bit of vertical climbing. It’s the classic “avoid obstacles, grab coins, stomp on baddies” formula, but the art style and variety of animals you can unlock to control adds a unique bit of charm to the experience. It’s also a well-balanced game, not too tough, but with enough tricky challenges to keep you from mindlessly running from one stage to the next. There’s even a co-op multiplayer mode, either locally or through random online matching, for extra chaos.

Stardew Valley is one of just a few games that can be credited for inspiring an entire genre: the “cozy game.” Sure, Story of Seasons series got there first and Animal Crossing is a juggernaut, but Stardew Valley really struck a nerve with gamers and non-gamers alike — the title has sold over 30 million copies as of this year across nearly every platform you can name (including Apple Arcade).

If you haven’t played it before, it’s a lovingly-rendered farming sim with 16-bit era graphics given a fresh coat of modern polish. The visuals, music and dialog from the various townspeople you meet all exude charm and friendliness, and there are tons of ways to customize the experience and make it yours, from the look of your character down to exactly what you do with each square of your land. And there’s even some light combat and adventure to be found while exploring mines near your farm. It’s not uncommon for people to sink hundreds of hours into this game, so being able to quickly check in from your phone could make this game even more addictive. For my money, though, I like playing it on an iPad where things are a bit less cramped.

No, this isn’t Flappy Bird — it’s far superior to that short-lived viral sensation. Tiny Wings has you piloting a little bird across a series of hilly islands, using those hills to get speed and air so you can fly as far as you can. It’s a classic “easy to play, hard to master” game, and you might max out how far you can conceivably go within a few days of trying the game. But that doesn’t make the attempt to go further than you ever have any less fun.

Tiny Wings‘ art is gorgeous and the music infections, and the little bird you’re controlling is just adorable. It’s a bright, beautiful and friendly game — but if you really want to master it, it’s going to take a lot of skill, practice and good luck.

The mission is simple: don’t get hit by a sawblade. Trust me, that’s easier said than done. In A Slight Chance of Sawblades, you control a pixelated character trying to avoid getting sliced up by a never-ending cascade of sawblades. You’ve got one minute to jump over as many as you can, and that’s pretty much it! But every blade you jump over adds a second to your timer, so if you’re good you can keep this going for a long time.

I’m not very good at it, but it’s still the kind of challenge that’s fun to pick up and try now and then. While most games will probably end with you clearing less than 10 blades, every so often you get in the groove and rack up an extremely satisfying high score. And then you’re immediately humbled by five games in a row where you don’t clear more than two. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions, this game. It may not be for everyone, but I was surprised at how quickly I got sucked in trying to improve my score.

Ridiculous Fishing was originally released in 2013, back in the golden age of mobile games, when developers could charge $3 or $5 for a well-crafted game without in-app purchases or ads. After getting lost in the sands of time for a while, the team behind Ridiculous Fishing polished it up and added a few new features for an Apple Arcade release last year. As with the best mobile games, anyone can pick it up and play without much introduction. A fishing line descends, and you need to avoid grabbing a fish as long as possible. Once you do, the line starts being reeled in, and you want to get as many fish on it as you can. Moving your line is purely accelerometer-based, but once you pull up your catch… you shoot all the fish out of the sky for money? Yup, this is a weird one.

It’s another game that begs you to sink time into it, trying to make it as deep into the ocean as you can before you pick up a fish; then, you want to grab as many fish to shoot as possible to make as much money as possible. It’s a great feedback loop, and, well, it’s just a ridiculous game. It gets even more fun when you use that cash to grab power-ups like the chainsaw lure (which lets you just tear through fish in the ocean as you see fit) or a spring to make the fish fly extra-high, all the better to plug them with your shotgun.