Art

2018 · Endless Runner

Alto's Odyssey is one of the finest endless runners ever made and a strong case for mobile gaming as an art form. The visuals and soundtrack create something that feels closer to a living painting than a typical phone game. It won't satisfy players who need deep progression systems or constant novelty, and the endless runner format does have a ceiling. But for anyone looking for a beautiful, calming experience they can pick up for five minutes or lose an hour to, this remains an easy recommendation years after release.

2014 · Puzzle

Monument Valley is one of the finest games ever made for a phone. Its impossible architecture, ambient soundtrack, and perspective-bending puzzles create something closer to interactive art than a traditional puzzle game. The experience is over in under two hours, and that brevity is a real limitation for anyone expecting a meaty challenge. But what's here is so carefully crafted, so visually arresting, and so unlike anything else on mobile that the short runtime barely dents its reputation. This is a game people remember years after finishing it, and there's a reason for that.

2023 · Narrative Adventure

Kentucky Route Zero is a haunting work of interactive fiction that uses magical realism and theatrical staging to explore debt, loss, and the forgotten corners of America, arriving on mobile with its strange beauty fully intact.

2019 · Platformer

Gris is a watercolor dream of a game that uses platforming, color, and music to tell a wordless story about grief and recovery, creating one of the most visually stunning experiences on any mobile device.

2017 · Puzzle

Gorogoa is a breathtaking visual puzzle game where rearranging and layering hand-drawn panels reveals hidden connections, delivering a short but profoundly memorable experience unlike anything else on mobile.

2015 · Puzzle

Prune is a poetic puzzle game about growing trees toward sunlight by cutting away branches, delivering a wordless meditation on growth, destruction, and beauty that somehow moved people to tears with nothing but a tree and a swipe.

2014 · Emily St. John Mandel · 333 pages · Science Fiction

Emily St. John Mandel's post-apocalyptic novel is less interested in how civilization ends than in what makes civilization worth preserving, and its answer, art, connection, memory, has never felt more resonant.

2015 · Endless Runner

Alto's Adventure earned its reputation as one of the best mobile games ever made, and it holds up years later. Its visuals and soundtrack create an atmosphere that most phone games never even attempt, and the one-tap controls make it effortless to pick up. The endless runner format does have a ceiling, and players hungry for deep progression or constant variety will find it eventually. But for anyone looking for a calming, beautiful game they can enjoy in short bursts or long sessions alike, this remains one of the easiest recommendations on any app store.

2020 · Puzzle

Manifold Garden is a first-person puzzle game set in an infinite, Escher-inspired architectural world where gravity is a tool and reality repeats endlessly. The visual design is breathtaking, and the gravity-shifting mechanic creates puzzles that fundamentally change how you think about space.

1940 · James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen · 125 min · Animation, Musical, Fantasy

Fantasia is Disney's most daring and artistically ambitious film, a marriage of classical music and animation that remains unlike anything else in the studio's catalog.

2010 · Patti Smith · 304 pages · Memoir

Patti Smith's memoir of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe is a love story, an artist's origin story, and a portrait of a vanished New York all at once. Her prose has the same directness and rhythm as her music, and her account of two young people making art out of nothing in late-1960s Manhattan is both specific and universal. The book's narrow focus means it says little about Smith's later career or her life beyond Mapplethorpe's orbit, and some readers wish she'd gone deeper into the darker periods rather than maintaining a tone of tender remembrance throughout. But as a memoir about the making of an artist, and the particular bond between two people who helped each other become who they were, it's uncommonly beautiful.

2017 · Puzzle

Old Man's Journey is a hand-painted puzzle game about a man's reflective trek through the countryside, where reshaping the landscape to create paths forward mirrors the bittersweet act of looking back on a life lived.

2019 · 3-5 Players · ~30 min · Competitive

Pictures challenges players to recreate photographs using wildly different creative materials, from sticks and stones to colored cubes to shoelaces, creating a Spiel des Jahres-winning party game where the creativity of the attempts is more entertaining than guessing correctly.