Last weekend was the 35th anniversary of the original Game Boy, the fat little grey rectangle that was the first console to let you play decent games on holiday, assuming you could find enough AA batteries and exactly the right amount of light for its grey-green screen. The Game Boy was a coveted item in the school playground for me, but these days we all carry around super-powered gaming devices in our pockets. Playing something fun on the bog has never been easier.
And yet, what often happens when you innocently try to download an entertaining game for your phone is often no fun at all. You open your chosen app store, stare at 4,000 options all with practically identical thumbnail images, and choose something with a decent user rating, which then turns out to lock all of the actual fun behind paywalls. Either it’ll try to stealthily sign you up a £34.99 annual subscription after a five-day trial, or it’ll stop you playing more until you cough up to remove a timer, or – possibly worst of all – it’ll make you watch endless baffling video ads for other, even more horrible games.
There are still good games you can play on a mobile phone, if you know where to look. Apple has made a really big deal out of the gaming capabilities of the iPhone 15, on which you can play Resident Evil 4. (Whether you’d want to is another matter.) Its Apple Arcade subscription service (£6.99 a month) is full of greatest hits from the entire history of mobile gaming (such as Cut the Rope, Ridiculous Fishing and Sneaky Sasquatch), alongside new, temptingly offbeat ones. What the Car is a work of comedy genius, Stardew Valley is a perennial farming-game hit, The Gardens Between (pictured above) is a touching sibling-story puzzle game that’s almost as good as Monument Valley, and Cooking Mama Cuisine got my seven-year-old son asking if we could make tonkatsu at home.
If you are a Netflix subscriber, meanwhile, you might not know that you also have access to a library of mobile games, and whoever’s in charge of the curation there has excellent taste. Bafta-winner Before Your Eyes is something everyone should play (not on the bus, though, it’s a crier). They’ve got mobile versions of all the classic Grand Theft Auto games. If you like more complex action games, meanwhile, Hades has you trying to escape hell as the king of the underworld’s son Zagreus, with the help of unsettlingly hot portrayals of the Greek gods. Fans of old point-n-click adventures will enjoy the magical-realist Kentucky Route Zero and post-climate-disaster tale Highwater. There are also decent games that tie into Netflix’s series, from The Queen’s Gambit to Stranger Things.
The nice thing about these subscription services is that they’re full of games chosen by actual humans, not algorithms. They take a lot of the guesswork out of finding something to play, and they’re mercifully free of aggressive monetisation. Fun, non-exploitative free games do exist, though, if you want something to dip into for a few minutes here and there: Alto’s Odyssey (pictured above) lets you surf soothingly across the desert, Marvel Snap has taken over the lives of every nerdy man of a certain age in my life, and after 12 years, the approachable and moreish mega-hit that is Candy Crush is still going strong (as are its slightly younger sister games, Candy Crush Soda and Farm Heroes). You don’t get millions of people to match candies for over a decade by relentlessly exploiting them.
If all else fails: you’ve probably still got some iteration of the Game Boy languishing in a drawer or an attic box. The screen might be hilariously rubbish by today’s standards, but the games are still good – and unlike modern mobile devices, it’s built to last.
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