Point-and-tap adventures are back, and they're gorgeous

Adventure games and touchscreens were always going to get along. Tapping to explore, dragging items, examining a strange object — it all feels natural on a phone in a way it never quite did with a mouse. The genre has quietly bloomed here.

Hollow Lantern is the game that made me write this. Its foggy seaside town is a place I still think about, and its puzzles trust you to reason rather than brute-force. Nothing there felt like padding.

My advice: slow down. Adventure games punish rushing. Look at everything, read the descriptions, and give yourself permission to sit with a puzzle for a while. The stuck moments are part of the fun when the design is fair.

We're spoiled for choice right now. If you wrote off mobile adventures years ago, it's worth another look — the good ones are as atmospheric as anything on a bigger screen.