Reddit has a lot of opinions. Some of them you don’t need to listen to. Other ones, like when they put together lists of great mobile games, are worth clicking through. If you do, you’ll probably find yourself a few new distractions. And really, some of the suggestions are so good, you’ll realize mobile gaming got serious when you weren’t looking. We combed through the suggestions to find the best mobile games according to Reddit.
The Room
Really good mystery games are hard to come by no matter what device you’re playing on and mobile games are notoriously full of crap, so having a really good mystery game on mobile is like finding an onion ring in your Burger King fries order. The Room is great because it’s clear the developers didn’t phone it in to make some crappy adware. They constructed a suspenseful, atmospheric game with nearly photorealistic graphics (depending on the resolution and power of your mobile device). On top of that, these aren’t mindless puzzles you put up with when you’re bored of doing other things. They’re intense challenges that need your full attention. It’s so well made, you’ll probably find yourself picking up your phone instead of turning on your full size consoles. iOS | Android
Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic
The Roller Coaster Tycoon franchise is famous for two reasons. The first is the potential for someone to make hugely elaborate roller coasters to show off their engineering prowess. The other is the gruesome murders committed by cars flying off tracks and into crowds of unwitting park goers or by drowning riders in huge water features. The most entertaining players often combined the two. Now you can take both on the go with you, ensuring your commute is full of genius, bloodshed, or blood shed by geniuses. iOS | Android
Plants vs. Zombies
Plants vs. Zombies is a classic and probably the game on this list you already have loaded on your phone. You may not have played it for awhile, but you probably have it downloaded. Consider this a reminder to boot it back up. For those of you who don’t have it downloaded and are wondering what the hell a plant could possibly do to adequately threaten a zombie, it might be more helpful to think of this game as a cross between a classic tower defense and checkers/chess. There’s a game area with a bunch of squares, you use different types of plants to fight different zombies, and you’re trying to defend your home base from an attack with stationary turrets. For a mobile game, it’s surprisingly deep. iOS | Android
Rebuild
Turn based strategy only appeals to us on a macro scale. That is, we can only really play them when we’re dealing with turns that make sense. Lining up face to face with enemies and letting each other take turns whaling on each other doesn’t make sense. Using rounds to manage the development of a civilization does. Rebuild follows the latter, having the player set up, sustain, and expand a small (but growing) community of zombie apocalypse survivors. It’s a more blown out view of the zombie apocalypse than we usually get, but we’re happy for the new angle. iOS | Android
911 Operator
911 Operator isn’t a game so much as it is a simulation. It’s an attempt to faithfully recreate the everyday experiences of operators all over the country as they try and juggle calls from anyone and everyone. You’ll have bored kids, people who are terrified of the masked bandit outside their window (who’s just a raccoon), neighbors who are sure rap music in a garage is a sign of satanism, and multi-car accidents where people are in as many pieces as the cars. It can be overwhelming, to say the least. Maybe this will build up a bit of sympathy for the poor souls who have to corral these calls in real life. iOS | Android
Ridiculous Fishing
Sometimes you get a game that is exactly what it sounds like. Ridiculous Fishing is one of those. This is a game where you use ridiculous things to fish for ridiculous numbers of fish. Guns, chainsaws, and toasters are a few of the instruments the game brags about, and you’re supposed to use them to catch and/or mutilate as many fish as possible. Not that the game’s particularly graphic. It’s more cartoonish than anything else. Which helps, because the rain of gore that would result from a man flinging a dozen fish in the air and tearing them apart with a machine gun would be slightly off putting. iOS | Android
DATA WING
Data Wing looks like it’s set in a world where the asteroid busting spaceship from Asteroid busted all the asteroids and has now been devoted solely to racing and time trials. Your ship is the same general shape and it’s always threatening to careen out of control, the second part being our biggest downfall whenever we’re deep into a retro gaming binge. Sadly, this is not an Asteroids sequel. It’s really a standalone game where you control a ship trying to carry data from one part of a computer system to another. There’s also a surprisingly well-crafted story to go along with the game, so it might even be able to stand in for one of your podcasts for a little while. iOS | Android
The Ensign
Our first and only platform exclusive on the list, The Ensign is a text-based adventure game and is actually a prequel to another game called A Dark Room. One of the main challenges in making a text-based adventure game is crafting a story that will keep people around for awhile, which we think The Ensign has done. You play a member of an alien species known as the Wanderers, who are currently losing an interstellar war with humanity, which also makes it one of the few sci-fi properties where humans aren’t getting their asses handed to them as soon as the extraterrestrials show up. The game also uses some elements of permadeath mechanics, which means you can’t just boot up a quick save whenever you don’t get your way. Your choices matter and you feel the stakes the entire time. iOS
Jetpack Joyride
Jetpack Joyride is one of those games that could only exist on mobile devices. It’s outlandish, it’s weird, it’s action-packed, and it’s simple to control. You basically ride wild machines and collect things to get points, all while wearing crazy outfits. No one thought particularly hard at any point in the game’s development, which we don’t mean as an insult. We mean it’s a perfectly entertaining game that will keep you visually engaged while you wait for the traffic on the subway line in front of you to clear up. iOS | Android
Monument Valley
Monument Valley is one of the games that convinced us paying money for mobile apps wasn’t a complete rip off. It’s beautiful, has an impressive soundtrack, and the puzzles are enough to keep you scratching your head for hours at a time. They’re based mostly on issues with perspective and optical illusions, so not only do you have to take a little while to understand what you’re seeing, you have to take even longer to understand what you’re supposed to do with it. You could get lost in this world pretty easily, and we mean that as a terrible pun and a high compliment. iOS | Android
Plague Inc.
We’re not really sure if Plague Inc. is the same game we’ve been playing for all these years or if there are a dozen clones floating around with small variations on the same pandemic theme. What we do know is this is the best version we’ve played. Before, when we’d play on our desktop or laptop, we’d start to lose interest. On mobile, we get to keep the game going in our free time. Our favorite part is trying to destroy the world with a deadly disease while we sit in the doctor’s office waiting to be treated so we don’t die of a deadly disease. iOS | Android
