Sometimes life throws a pack of mummies and raging bulls at you, and the only thing to do is run like heck. I Hate Running Backwards is an endless runner that mixes close call dodges with loud weaponry. As the screen fills with enemies and explosions, it gets harder and harder to run away. It's a furious race for safety and a great way to blow off some steam.
Sometimes, you just want to hit the road. Photon Highway takes cues from games such as Audiosurf and Temple Run to create a randomised highway through the stars. It's great for those times you want to sit back and cruise away from life's problems.
The long-awaited sequel to Snowman's wonderful endless snowboarding game is finally here. While Alto's Odyssey swaps the snow-capped mountains of Alto's Adventure for sandy deserts and jungle temples, it's still incredibly chill.
Void Wisp is an arcade game all about soothing soundscapes and living life as close to the edge as possible. Players control a small mote of light floating through an obstacle course of shapes and laser beams that create noise the closer you get to them. In order to get the most points, players need to grind as close as possible to obstacles and narrowly avoid projectiles. It's tricky but also soothing.
If League of Legends were a mobile game, I like to think it'd be something like a slickly produced version of last year's sleeper hit Flappy Bird: cute, charming, distressing at its difficult low points and dizzying at its high ones. Riot probably feels differently about this, as evidenced by Blitzcrank's Poro Roundup.
Years of iteration and mainstream popularity have taken their toll on the endless runner genre, rendering it tired and worn despite its young age. Endless snowboarder Alto's Adventure defies that notion, stripping away layers of gaudy mobile paint to rediscover the genre's elegant core.
Video: The moment someone utters the term "endless runner", my eyes begin to glaze over. And yet, as I watched the utterly gorgeous trailer for Alto's Adventure, a snowy adventure through the mountains, I began to consider an exception. Alto's Adventure comes out next week on iOS.
Endless runners are simple games. The genre, popularised by titles such as Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride, has players running endlessly and grabbing coins. Well, for one young man in China's Macao, the endless run's earned him a pay cheque of over $3700.
