There was a time where iPhone games were merely a distraction. You’d play them on a commute, or while the water boiled, or during Destiny loading screens. But that was then, and this is now. In case you didn’t know, today’s options are just as polished (and fun!) as many console counterparts. And now that there are more games on the App Store than stars in the Milky Way, some curation is imperative. That’s where we come in. Here are the best iPhone games on the market.
The Japanese role-playing game Fantasian is undeniably beautiful. And it’s thoughtful, too. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi made it, and, like that other series, it’s grounded by wide-eyed fantasy and a twinkly soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu that makes you feel like you’re glowing in twilight. You can take that feeling with you as you explore the game’s intricate world—made up of almost 160 handmade, 3D-scanned dioramas—as wide-eyed amnesiac Leo.
Leo has entered another dimension, called the Machine Realm, and you need to guide him through it by interacting with locations and engaging in turn-based combat with looming demons, getting strong before your final fight with Vam the Malevolent. But fighting doesn’t need to get in the way. A “Dimengion” mechanic allows you to stick enemies you already encountered in another dimension’s dungeon and continue your wandering. That’ll show them. And Fantasian will show you the stunning, immersive possibilities of modern mobile gaming.
A good match for: Final Fantasy fans, Guillermo del Toro geeks that get excited by handmade magic.
Not a good match for: The turn-based averse.
Watch it in action.
Download for free (with a $5-a-month Apple Arcade subscription).
If Found… is an interactive visual novel organized around one simple mechanic: erase everything. The main character is Kasio, a twentysomething trans woman who’s returned home to Achill Island, in Ireland. Most of If Found… is told through her journal. As you flip through its pages, you’ll need to erase away the scribbles, doodles, and text to progress. A secondary plot takes place in the future, and centers around an astronaut named Cassiopeia. At the start, she discovers a black hole in our solar system, which obviously spells bad news. The two narratives interweave in ways you won’t expect, and you shouldn’t go in knowing more than that. This game is brief enough (about two hours or so) to take in in one shot.
A good match for: Anyone hungry to feel things.
Not a good match for: The impatient; If Found… isn’t exactly an action-packed game.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the App Store
Adorable Home makes settling down look simple, a smooth, pleasurable process that’s plastered in pastel and hypoallergenic cat hair. The passive gameplay mostly involves decorating your new white picket fence home, but you’re also tasked with creating delectable bento boxes for your partner (whose gender and skin color you can choose) and petting your scruffy cat, Snow.
Properly engaging in domestic bliss helps you earn love, which you can spend on decor, gardening, and more photogenic cats. In short, this unchallenging game is the blanket on the couch—soft, soothing. Something to tie your weary day together.
A good match for: Cozy game aficionados, anyone who needs something to look at on their phone that won’t cause them unbounded grief.
Not a good match for: Adrenaline junkies, cat haters, adrenaline junkies who hate cats as much as they love adrenaline.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the App Store.
C’mon, it’s Stardew Valley! Eric Barone’s farming sim has sold millions of copies across more than half a dozen platforms. There’s a good chance you know what it’s all about, but for those who don’t, here you go: Stardew Valley hands you, via inheritance, a humble spit of land in a small town. From there, your ostensible goal is to build up a farm. In addition to standard farming sim fare—fishing, cooking, Harvest Mooning—you also can plunder caves for materials (and some monster-hunting).
The joy of Stardew Valley doesn’t come from mind-blowing game mechanics or a life-changing story. The joy is in the repetition. You talk to your fellow townspeople. You do your chores. You live every day as you do, all while time continues unabated and unbothered. As a result, Stardew Valley, despite its low-fi visuals, is one of gaming’s closest approximations of life—of all its fusses and lulls. Good luck finding a more introspective commute-waster.
A good match for: Those who are sick of Animal Crossing yet want to scratch that itch. The hungover.
Not a good match for: Those who are sick of Animal Crossing. The sick and hungover.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the App Store.
To say that playing Gris is like playing though painting, or playing out a poem, doesn’t do it justice. You play as a young woman, who starts out curled in a clearly broken emotional state in the literal palm of a goddess-sized statue. At its core, the gameplay consists of risk-free running and jumping. There’s no combat. You can’t “die.” When you start, the world is essentially stripped of color. As you progress, you unlock more traversal abilities, and levels start to fill in with color. A picture emerges: Gris isn’t just another profound indie platformer with a giant heart on its sleeve. It’s a meditation—on depression, on fleeting friendship, on finding the will to keep on keeping on. Best of all, you can play through the whole thing in a matter of hours. Hear! hear! to games that respect our time.
A good match for: Fans of indie games, great art, or terrific music (the Barcelona-based indie trio, Berlinist, composed a haunting, hopeful score that’ll shake you to your bones).
Not a good match for: Players seeking a challenge or an adrenaline rush.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from The App Store.
It’s not easy to find a mobile racer that feels like a console game. Asphalt 9: Legends is as close as it gets. Like many other racing games, you get the keys to a garage full of the world’s most coveted rides—Beemers, Ferraris, Lambos—and push them to their limits on an envy-inducing travelog. You’ll rev your engine in some Insta-famous urbanscapes, like Rome and Shanghai, but also some less-traveled backgrounds.
One level takes you through the idyllic Scottish countryside. Another zips through winding roads of the Himalayas. (Hey, we didn’t say Asphalt 9 gets points for realism.) But the best part of this racer is that, unlike many of its peers, it plays like the best console racing games: smooth and fast with just a little touch of Burnout-style ridiculousness. As a bonus, Asphalt 9 is quite a looker.
A good match for: Fans of Burnout, Need for Speed, Forza (Horizon), and other high-octane racers.
Not a good match for: Anyone who’s literally behind the wheel. Seriously: Don’t text and drive.
Watch it in action.
Kotaku video lead Eric Schulkin says that tile-matching game You Must Build A Boat “has not left [his] phone since 2015,” and though it hasn’t been updated since 2019, it doesn’t really matter when gameplay is this primed for swirling you into its galaxy. As you match tiles to perform actions—smashing a row of key tiles to unlock a treasure chest, for example, or cracking open a crate tile to grab a weapon from inside—you’ll eventually notice that three hours have passed. Yeah, you spent that long looking at Minecraft-level graphics. But You Must Build A Boat’s strategic puzzles are stimulating, and completing different runs helps you build your skinny pixel protagonist a giant boat. Sometimes it’s about the simple things in life.
A good match for: Puzzle enthusiasts, procrastinators.
Not a good match for: Those looking for an “AAA” experience,” anyone who never really “got” Candy Crush.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the App Store.
The first game from Hearthstone director Ben Brode’s studio Second Dinner, Marvel Snap is a card game with meat on its bones. Wisely stack your 12-card slots with 2D Marvel superheroes, and form the ideal supergroup for overpowering opponents in lightning flash, six-turn tournaments. They never exceed a few minutes, but that isn’t the “snap” part. Snapping is more of a strategy, a function that allows you to double a match’s stakes at the cost of some ranked points, or cosmic cubes. Opponents can snap back, or reject you and lose (while retaining their points). You get all the adrenaline of taking down Thanos without any of the chipped nails it requires.
If Marvel Snap sounds simple, that’s good—that’s what makes it so satisfying. The game’s emphasis on small and fast helps “you quickly learn all of what your deck and its cards can do, letting you focus more on playing and not learning,” Kotaku staff writer Zack Zwiezen says in his review. “Within a few hours I had a few decks built and I was having a blast figuring out ways to synergize my deck.” Marvel Snap is fun, familiar, and best of all, it’s free.
A good match for: Marvel devotees, anyone who liked Marvel’s Midnight Suns, slow learners.
Not a good match for: People who like a long run-time, or story; Martin Scorsese.
Watch it in action.
Goth roguelike Vampire Survivors made its mobile debut recently and with appropriate gloominess—the indie game’s developers said in a Steam update that rampant clones “forced our hand to release the mobile game ASAP, and put a lot of stress on the dev team that wasn’t even supposed to worry about mobile in the first place”—but, well, now that it’s here, it’s pretty goddamn good.
Like the undemanding original, Vampire Survivors offers 30-minute runs exploding with bats, skeletons, and whatever timed, mystical nonsense your stoic survivor character has to kill them with. You’ll be glad to get lost in this game’s dangerous, repeating roads.
And while its PC version is available on Steam for $5, mobile Vampire Survivors cleverly uses optional advertisements to stay free and afloat. You can sustain a long run by watching an ad, and if you die, you can opt again to watch an ad to keep more of your collected gold coins, which can be used for permanent upgrades.
A good match for: Roguelike lovers, Castlevania admirers, 8-bit Hot Topic shoppers.
Not a good match for: Impatient people, those who fear death and pixellated bad guys.
Watch it in action.
Catalyst Black is a multiplayer shooter that looks like watercolor League of Legends. You can level up your guns and gear to blast people (or up to five friends) away more effectively. It’s attractive and fast-paced, with available different modes and weapons, including a destructive “primal” creature you use a mask to transform into. Overall, this is an ideal option for FPS lovers who’ve been wishing for little guns to tap via their iPhone screen. Though, it has one noticeable wart—buying in-app purchases will help you “progress faster,” the developers say on the game’s website.
A good match for: Overwatch killers, League of Legends experts, anyone who doesn’t immediately throw up upon hearing the words “pay-to-win.”
Not a good match for: People looking for elaborate backstory, anyone who immediately throws up upon hearing the words “pay-to-win.”
Watch it in action.
Threes! is basically a game about kissing. And math. You slide a bunch of numbers around a tiled pad, trying to get two like numbers next to each other. If you can do that, they’ll get friendly and combine to form a new, bigger number. Keep on moving, keep on combining, and your score will climb and climb. Threes is an immaculately designed game made all the more winning for its aesthetics. Charming, musical, and deviously addictive, it’ll become your new iPhone obsession.
A good match for: People looking for a simple puzzle game to play on a commute, anyone who likes competing with their friends for high scores.
Not a good match for: People hoping for a deep story, those who prefer sub-standard clones.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the App Store.
We know people love to hate this bad boy, but isn’t he dreamy? Though heavily criticized for its expensive in-app transactions, the massively multiplayer online action RPG Diablo Immortal is high-contrast and gorgeous, splattered in blood and ghosts. And if it helps, Kotaku writer Zack Zwiezen and editor John Walker agree in their discussion of the game that they never felt goaded into making a purchase, or like their brimming enthusiasm was ever threatened by their zipped wallets.
“The other thing that keeps surprising me is how needlessly detailed it is,” Walker says in that discussion. “You do a dungeon and suddenly the boss fight turns out to be three stages, each one involving a big environmental change, and then there’s a surprise bonus bit at the end. Or maybe I’m just doing some of the bounties from the bounty board, and instead of ‘kill 10 of those’ which some are, it turns out to be a whole little story, an investigation into a crime or something.”
“This isn’t disposable,” he continued. “This is a whole proper Blizzard game.”
A good match for: Diablo disciples, anyone looking for a fantastic, portable MOBA with two-factor authentication activated for their bank login.
Not a good match for: Those who miss the old Diablo, anyone who had to grab a bucket after being forced to think about pay-to-win games again.
Watch it in action.
Want more of the best games on each system? Check out our complete directory:
The Best PC Games • The Best PS4 Games • The Best Games On PlayStation Now • The Best Xbox One Games • The Best Games On Xbox Game Pass • The Best Nintendo Switch Games • The Best Wii U Games • The Best 3DS Games • The Best PS Vita Games • The Best Xbox 360 Games • The Best PS3 Games • The Best Wii Games • The Best iPhone Games • The Best iPad Games • The Best Android Games • The Best PSP Games • The Best Facebook Games • The Best DS Games • The Best Mac Games • The Best Browser Games • The Best PC Mods
