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Dumb Ways to Die is a compilation of mini-games involving cute bean a like characters in dangerous situations under the thematic of safety. The game was created part of a public service announcement campaign for Metro Trains in Melbourne. The video of this campaign became a humongous viral hit and won an impressive list of prestigious prizes that brought great visibility and success to the original message of safety around train. The game itself was ingeniously developed by Julian Frost(that also directed and fully animated the video) and Samuel Baird, an australian collaborative duo that works together under the name Barrel of Donkeys. The gameplay à la Wario Ware: Smooth Moves combined with the adorably morbid and fluid animations made this game an undeniable classic of mobile games.

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Pudding Monsters is a jelly stick-‘em-together puzzle game by ZeptoLab. It is no surprise coming from this studio that the quality of its beautiful graphics and animations is equal to its smart and challenging puzzle design. All of it blended in a flat isometric perspective that show highly polished and perfectly integrated prop and background assets. The brand concept on its own to combine individual little cute pudding cyclops to create a multi-eyes bigger version of them was simply brilliant. It is therefore no surprise this game here!

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Badland is an atmospheric side-scrolling physics-based action adventure platformer. It takes place in a mysterious forest where the gameplay evolve on a well designed dark silhouette foreground full of imaginative traps and obstacles. The objective is to bring alive the inhabitants of the forest from point A to B in a multitude of dangerous levels. The physics of the game are surprisingly well made and every level is a great challenge on its own. The game was made by two developers at Frogmind, a small game studio in Helsinki. A sequel was also released under the same name.

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Hackycat is a ridiculously funny and simple little hacky sack game. The goal was to make high scores and unlock cute cats design(like Tacocat or Duke Pussington), athletes and stages by buying them with tofu burgers. What more can you ask for! It was entirely developed and designed by Ken Wong, the lead designer behind Monument Valley. This is an perfect example of a great and a well designed mobile indie game. Since the game is not available anymore, I added the game trailer in this post to give a better idea of the gameplay.

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Monster Flip is a good old match 3 featuring colorful little box monsters. The game mechanics are not completely innovating, but the artistic direction and branding was a unique and charming change to the overcrowded ‘’food and farm’’ thematic from the same genre. Although it was no revolution in the world of match 3, the puzzle based levels option was a good addition to the game and brought a nice twist of passive intellectual challenges. Coming from PikPok(what, again?) it is no surprise that the visual and animations are so well designed. They even contracted Paper Foldables to make these super cute paper toys version of the main monsters.

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Kingdom Rush is a classic tower defence that take place in mid-age fantastic universe. The game was originally released as a flash game and became a huge hit. Sometimes later, the mobile version was published and it became as well one of the most popular tower defence of all time on the mobile stores. This is due to an amazingly well balanced game design with beautiful cartoony flash look alike graphics. As well as tons of possible skills updates and epic heroes to acquire. The game was made by an originally small independent studio from Uruguay named Ironhide. It has now grown to a much bigger studio that handle multiple production at the time and is a great proof that passion, vision and smart design can bring you far in this industry. Kingdom Rush Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Origins where later released as sequels for the fans of this genre who were thirsty for more epic tower defence battles!

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Into the Dead is a first person infinite runner where you have to dodge and kill zombies to progress into a dark and foggy environment. Along the way you will find various weapons, from the classic pistol to the deadly chainsaw! This immersive mood and gameplay was ingeniously designed by PikPok studio. They also made an Oculus Rift version that looks quite interesting!

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Slam Dunk King is a swipe, grab and toss basketball game where you have to make tricks and slam dunk like a king! Combos, bombs, specials and many great swiping gestures make this game a fully complete and challenging mobile game experience. It’ was a whole lot fun trying to master all the tricks while tossing away incoming bombs and making dunk like a pro! This game was developed by PikPok, a New Zealand based studio that feature an impressive collection of well designed games. Don’t be surprised to see more of their games on this blog!

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Blast-A-Way is a 3D physics puzzler game developed by Illusion Labs. You have to help three robot heroes to save the lost boxies by blowing thing to pieces and solving puzzles made out of wood, metal, fabric, stone and plastic. The tools you can use include bombs, teleporters, rebuilders, colorizers, portals, color gates and more. This game is surprisingly well made with intuitive controls to navigate in its 3d environments, features nice special effects and has quite challenging puzzles. It was definitively a blast! to explode these colorful worlds and rescue all the cute little robots boxies.

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Hero Academy is a two-player turn-based tactics created by the developer Robot Entertainment. Every teams have their own gameplay strategies and special characters. I got hooked by the concept really fast as it felt like playing a fantastic simplified version of chess with cool little interactive animations and nice hand painted design. The game is also available on steam.

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Gesundheit is a booger-flinging action-puzzle game designed by Matt Hammill  and developed in collaboration with Revolutionary Concepts. It features charming hand drawn visuals with fluid animations in one very unique art style. The puzzles are smart, simple and challenging and there is even few little cinematics to give a bit of storytelling support. This game is the perfect proof that well made original gameplay and art style can make your game last forever. It is still up to this day, one of my favourite mobile game ever.