You won’t find a best mobile games list without Monument Valley. Partly inspired by the pictures of M. C. Escher, Monument Valley tells the story of Ida, on a quest for forgiveness that takes her over impossible architecture, through beautiful scenes, amid an atmospheric soundtrack. To progress, you’ll have to rotate ledges, manipulate switches and change water levels, or rearrange entire buildings, all the while outwitting the mysterious Crow People.

Monument Valley is more of a brain teaser than a head-scratcher, with a fairly gentle difficulty curve and little in the way of bamboozlement. It’s all the better for it, offering relaxing and surprisingly immersive gameplay in relatively manageable chunks. No wonder it, the Forgotten Shores expansion pack, and Monument Valley 2 have between them scooped all kinds of awards and plaudits.

While Monument Valley’s challenges might leave you stumped for only a minute or two, those in The Room might leave you tearing your hair out overnight. The first in a series of fiendish escape room style games, this stylish and atmospheric puzzler will, at times, take over your thoughts.

In this original game you begin in the titular room, in front of a safe, seemingly summoned to solve the puzzles inside. But you’ll soon be drawn into cryptic challenges, matching patterns and thinking creatively to unlock, open, decode and otherwise make your way through the game.

Android users will need to pay upfront to play this game, while the App Store’s ‘Pocket’ version gives you the first level for free. In both cases, it’s less than £1 for a game that’ll have you waking up thinking ‘aha!’ more than once, and will likely whet your appetite for the sequels.

Equal parts adventure game, interactive story and puzzler, Edith Finch is included here because, well, it’s simply astonishing. Playing as the modern day Edith, you begin your exploration of the rambling, deserted family house, tracing back through the generations to discover why you are the only remaining Finch.

Each room in the Finch house tells a story: of a different family member and how they came to meet their unfortunate end. Your job is to relive each of their deaths, piecing together the mystery of an apparently cursed bloodline.

Unfortunately, this game isn’t available for Android phones, but you can find it on multiple other platforms including the PC and Nintendo Switch. There’s no sequel available, either, although publisher Annapurna Interactive does a nice line in similarly unusual indie games.

Edith Finch is beautiful and atmospheric, and the stories within it notable for their variety. One minute you might be swinging in a playground overlooking the ocean, another leaping from branch to branch as the cat of a young girl’s fever dream. Be warned, though: one shocking and deeply upsetting story will stay with you long after you’ve finished the game.

Individually, Edith Finch’s challenges and puzzles aren’t especially difficult to solve, but collectively they add to an absorbing and ultimately open-ended mystery. Edith Finch may only occupy you for a few hours, but it’ll haunt you for much longer.

On other platforms, the Hitman franchise is a series of third-person stealth games, taking place in a realistic 3D world. In this first mobile outing it becomes Hitman Go, a stylised board game leaning on puzzle elements and turn-based gameplay.

Hitman Go casts you as Agent 47, a ruthless contract killer, setting out on missions to eliminate specific targets. Each mission is presented as a separate board game, and further broken down into multiple turn-based scenes, in which you must try to outwit, outflank or simply kill everyone who stands in your way.

It’s a simple idea, and at first the scenes are simple – early levels can be solved with just a few moves. As you progress through the game, however, the difficulty goes up, and there’s an increasing amount of choice about how you ‘solve’ the scene. In the tradition of great games, you’ll find yourself going back and reattempting scenes you’ve already cleared to gather extra achievements such as ‘no kill’, ‘kill all enemies’, or ‘collect briefcase’.

This is hardly a game for deep thinkers, but it combines slick, stealthy play with dark humour and strategic challenges. Most levels can be cleared in a few minutes, making this an easy game to fit into short breaks. Our only criticism is that, while the ideas and style stay fresh, the gameplay can get a little repetitive.

Bridge Constructor Portal is very much the ‘Daddy and chips’ of the mobile gaming world. A mashup between the hugely successful Bridge Constructor and Portal series, BCP has you building hilariously shonky bridges for the Bendies of the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre. Get it wrong and they’re variously dissolved, vapourised or simply stuck. Get it right and you’ll be rewarded with more responsibility – and stress.

This game combines the physics-based challenge of actually building a bridge, with the additional complexity of portals that may or may not lead where you want them to. It’s not an in-depth mental workout, but it will have you building and rebuilding, trying to work out where to strengthen and lighten to make the level a success.

Although you can progress once a single Bendy makes it across, the real challenge lies in safely getting a convoy to the goal. Multiple vehicles, setting up nail-biting oscillations, tend to cause all kinds of chaos, showing your single-vehicle solution up for the cludge it was. There’s a surprising amount of depth and variation in this game’s 60 levels, but their difficulty curve could do with smoothing out a bit – some levels stand out as being especially tricky.