BADLAND

BADLAND is a darkly poetic, physics-based platformer in which a furry alien creature flies through a forest full of traps, gears, and hazards, while the player controls its wing-flapping against gravity with a single tap on the screen. The controls stay extremely simple, but the combination of physics, speed, and multiplying copies of the player's own character — the game can multiply the player's character into dozens of simultaneously flying copies — creates surprisingly demanding and chaotic moments where you need to react to narrow gaps and falling boulders within a split second.

The game was released in 2013 by the Finnish studio Frogmind, and at the time of release it was one of the most visible showcases of what the Unity graphics engine was capable of on mobile devices — dense, solid black silhouettes of the characters against a richly textured, almost photorealistic forest background looked unusual on phone displays. The game also offered local multiplayer for up to four players on a single device, either cooperatively or against each other, which was a rarity on mobile at the time.

The atmosphere is completed by an almost wordless, silent story and a dense, dark ambient soundtrack, which makes the game feel more like an art experience than a classic arcade title. BADLAND kept this tone and visual style in its sequel BADLAND 2, which expanded the same principle with new environments and new gameplay elements without abandoning the original simplicity of one-tap controls.

Why play it: For players who want a visually striking mobile platformer with atmosphere and undemanding but tense one-finger controls, BADLAND is still worth it today.