15 essential games for your new iPhone

Above: OK, enough with all that gushing over physics. For a little while, anyway

Image Credit: Playmous

God of Light ($2)

If you’re looking for some more puzzles, God of Light has what you need.

It’s a light-based puzzler in which your goal is to get a beam from one end of the screen to the other by reflecting, splitting, curving, and changing its color to get past obstacles. Extra fun comes from how level is completely dark when you start; it’s only after moving your light around do you see what you have to work with.

Above: This one’s for the word nerds.

Image Credit: Bacon Bandit Games

Letter Quest: Grimm’s Journey (Free)

This word game with role-playing elements — or role-playing game with word elements — puts you in the robes of an adorable Reaper and then sends you through a series of spelling-based battles with monsters. Because that makes complete sense.

You fight your enemies by spelling the longest words you can from the field of tiles at the bottom of the screen. Some of them have special abilities or will hurt you if you use them, so it also has a bit of strategy in it. But mostly, you’re just jacking up ghosts with spelling, and that’s absolutely something you want to do.

Above: It’s the monkey-in-a-lab puzzle game you never realized you needed.

Image Credit: Vested Interest

Simian Interface ($1)

You can play this exercise in spatial reasoning online, but it’s worth your dollar to solve its tricky puzzles with the tilt controls on your phone. It has you rearranging shapes and colors to put them into an unspecified configuration, but you have to figure out what that goal is as you go. Sometimes, you’re putting squares into boxes, and sometimes you’re arranging a variety of shapes into a single pattern.

It’s a quick play, but you’ll love it while it lasts. Especially because it has cats in it, for some reason.

Above: No, really. It’s fun.

Image Credit: Holy Water Games

Feed Me Oil 2 ($1)

A less ecologically responsible version of the Where’s My Water series, the Feed Me Oil games have you using gadgets, ramps, and fans to move black gold from a source pump into a goal area, where the living landscape in which all of this occurs will eat it or something.

But look — that’s not important. What matters is that it’s a cool and creative game with some very tricky puzzles and a ton of solving options. Each level doesn’t necessarily have one solution; it just gives you a start point, an end point, some tools, and a whole bunch of oil and leaves you to it.

Above: Hopefully, you’re partially psychic.

Image Credit: Evan Killham/GamesBeat

100 Floors (Free)

Our final suggestion for your new iPhone boasts an unbelievable amount of content, all for free (or 99 cents, if you want to lose the ads). It started out with the eponymous 100 puzzles, but regular updates have more than doubled that number. The basic format of all is the same, however: Use your phone’s various functions to tilt, tap, mute, and shake your way through a bunch of single-room puzzles.

They get pretty vague at times, but that’s part of the fun. Unless you frustrate easily, in which case you might want to stick with The Room for your touch-puzzling needs.