Geometry Dash

Geometry Dash looks at first glance like an undemanding rhythm jumper, but it hides one of the most brutal difficulty levels you can find on mobile – a little square or other shape moves left to right on its own, and the player jumps with a single tap on the screen, while any mistimed touch means instant death and a return to the start of the level. Jumps, gravity flips, and transformations into a rocket or ship happen exactly in the rhythm of the electronic music, so the level also functions as a visual score that the player, after dozens of attempts, memorizes almost by heart.

The game was released by studio RobTop Games in 2013, and from the start it was driven by two things – uncompromising but fair difficulty, where failure is always the player's own mistake, never the game's, and a built-in level editor into which the community churns out hundreds of thousands of custom levels full of ever-crazier traps and music synchronization. It's precisely this combination that turned Geometry Dash into a long-running phenomenon with its own streaming and competitive scene around the hardest user levels, which can only be cleared after hundreds or thousands of attempts.

Controls are purely touch-based and need just a single finger, the acclaimed soundtrack composed specifically for individual levels still gives the game energy years after release, and the basic game is available for free, while the full version with additional levels and features is bought once, without ads and without gacha.

Why play it: Players looking for a fair but mercilessly difficult rhythm challenge with a huge supply of community levels, and who don't mind hundreds of repeated attempts.