HACKER Q&A
📣 lenerdenator

Mobile games that can be beat


I recently downloaded and played an idle game that was taking up an inordinate amount of my time. What was originally a way to just kill some time here and there quickly spiraled into a major distraction to my work and relationships. I've deleted it off of my phone, but now I'm thinking about what makes these games so addicting, and one quality I thought up was that there's never really an "end" to these games. There's always a new objective, always some special event, always some challenge that wasn't there before.

When I think about the games I considered truly great (most of them from the N64 era), all of these games had something in common, mainly out of necessity: they had an end. Peach was found, Hyrule was freed, or all of the skaters and parks were unlocked.

I realize that this is antithetical to the objective of most mobile games. The objective there is to get you to watch ads and pay to win. It's more of a Skinner box than a piece of art.

Are there any good examples of "beatable" games on mobile, particularly iOS?


  👤 diggan Accepted Answer ✓
Apple Arcade have a bunch of games that are there for you to enjoy, not to extract as much money/time/adviews as possible. It's pay-per-month though, but has some good games.

I personally got stuck in Balatro (which is in Apple Arcade) which I guess you could say both have ends and no ends. If you get easily addicted to games, I suppose you should avoid Balatro.