It’s the very essence of what indie gaming is all about: this is no game made by committee, but one man’s utterly original and compelling vision brought to life.

Cyber Hacker is definitely worth a try if you’re into (fake) cyber security or lite-sim games, or if you just want the barista at your local coffee joint to think you’re toppling “the corps” on your tablet over a nice espresso.

Loot & Legends works hard to stay just on the right side of inoffensive. Both the battles and the deck-building offer enough options to give your mind something to chew on, but not so much as to cause anyone to choke.

Like its predecessor, this is a complex game with a lot of interesting ideas — but possibly a few ideas too many.

For all its pretension about history, Spirit of War is a disappointingly generic experience that could be set in any time period. Even on an App Store that’s chronically short of hex-based tactical games, it’s not particularly noteworthy.

Still, Sproggiwood is a clever, fast-paced RPG disguised by a tawdry facade. Is it particularly deep? No. Is there too much grind to it? Yes.

But Kindo is literally the only strategy game I’ve played which seems to me worth playing in a grocery store queue, and it delights me as an artifact which reflects its environment so insightfully.

Don’t Starve is unlike anything I’ve played before and I can’t stop myself from playing it. It’s frustrating as hell at times–finally getting farms built and then getting eating by roving hounds comes to mind–but I can’t turn it off.

It can be convincingly argued that Rodeo are the Blizzard of mobile gaming at this point — their commitment to polish and detail is like no other mobile-focused game dev studio going.

The app certainly doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, and actually enhances it by making it easy to play and beautiful to look at.

Her Story is a unique experience. You’ve never played anything like this before, and might never get the chance to play anything like it again.

A breeze to control, exciting to play and to excessively replay, laden with tactical playgrounds.

The game has got a couple of UI glitches, a tendency to crash, and a prodigious appetite for battery power. More abstract concerns arise from the basic limitations of the genre — these micro-session games are too far diluted from the formulas of Dungeon Keeper and Sim Tower to have any real bite to them.

Infection is one of the good ones, a board game port that will live on my iPad for a long time, and one that has me excited to see what other board games HexWar might be bringing to the platform.

Buy it, gift it, skirmish it, campaign it; whatever happens, just enjoy it. Spacecom is nothing more than it needs to be, and it very much is.

You Must Build A Boat is such a rare combination of frenetic speed and methodical planning that its closest relative might be Dark Souls.

It’s a marvelous structure, easily allowing players to learn the game’s basics and discover whether the interface suits them better than it did me.

Atlantic Fleet retains the endlessly playable turn-based combat of its predecessor, but now it’s been fitted with a thoughtfully designed open-ended strategy game superstructure.

It’s basically grinding for 8+ hours with nothing to really show for it and, unlike its forebear, doesn’t even have the humor to hold your interest all the way through

MicRogue is a game where, even if you fail seven times in a row, chances are you’ll have failed each time on the eighth or ninth stages. Even when you’re losing it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost much at all.

It’s a nearly perfect port of a classic PC game, something we haven’t really seen since Firaxis brought us XCOM.

From the perspective of a licensor, Coup is just about the perfect iOS adaptation: it’s polished, with some genuinely interesting value added (including probably my favorite game art in memory and a satisfying achievement system), and introduces the game very well without making a physical copy seem superfluous.

Last Voyage is a puzzle game which is uncharacteristically comfortable with—and perhaps cautiously optimistic about—the unknown.

It’s not going to knock off Agricola or Galaxy Trucker as a full-blown euro, but as a quick diversion, Pickomino is an excellent choice and another really well made board game app for iOS.

The game translates a board game of the same name which itself borrowed very heavily from Kingsburg, a well-regarded Euro. Like the joke, there’s very little about the result which is original, and the new expectations created by the digital format create requirements it fails to satisfy.

Once again, inkle Studios has bested themselves in creating the gold standard for interactive fiction, and causing us all to start wondering when the next chapter will arrive.

Despite being a tad beige and not hugely ambitious, The Trace is a palatable concoction of hidden object and traditional first-person adventure gaming. Worth trampling a crime scene for, if only to see where the series will go.

The lack of content undermines the feeling of exploring beyond the final frontier and the limp combat is an awkward step back from the elegant Ace Patrol.