orange ball on the red block bouncing game music game bouncy ball on a block

It has everything I’m looking for in a mobile game: a simple concept that makes smart use of the touchscreen, action that grows increasingly more complicated, and charming art and music. Each ball makes a sound when it hits a block, creating a steady rhythm once everything’s in the right place. The goal is to shift blocks into the right position to bounce balls towards the target. Here are Paste’s picks for the best mobile games of the 2010s.ĮLOH’s another gorgeous puzzle game perfectly calibrated for touchscreens. We’re not here to point out what’s wrong with mobile games, though, but to highlight the games that made this decade the artistic and commercial boom period that it was for mobile games. Yes, too much of this market is underpinned with microtransactions and free-to-play shenanigans, but the recently launched Apple Arcade subscription service will hopefully minimize those exploitative tactics. The best mobile games combine the pick-up-and-play ease of smartphones with elegant design and the kind of magnetic gameplay loop that keeps you enthralled far longer than you ever expected. Sometimes that could result in creative dead ends-early this decade some designers spent too much time showing what mobile games could do, rather than exploring and building on what they should do.

As console games became more and more beholden to digital distribution, and smartphones became both omnipresent and more powerful, it became harder to draw a distinction between the two. The genre came into its own over the last ten years, both creatively and commercially, with the walls between mobile games and the traditional gaming market collapsing as time wore on. Mobile games weren’t born this decade, but this was still the mobile decade.

Orange ball on the red block bouncing game music game bouncy ball on a block