Sometimes I wonder if Justin Smith from Captain Games realizes his own genius when creating games, or if he just makes games that happen to be stunningly brilliant. One of my all-time favorite games is Enviro-Bear 2010 [$0.99], which is a silly game about a bear driving a car with absurdly difficult driving physics. Beyond its wacky surface, though, there is a ton of depth, and it's remained on my phone since its original release nearly a decade ago. Then there's Desert Golfing [$1.99]. This totally stripped-down 2D golfing game has you whacking a ball into a hole in as few strokes as possible, moving from hole to hole in stark, barely changing environments until? well, until the world falls into the sun, or something. I guess it technically has an end, but most people will never see it and most don't seem to care. It's a perfect mobile game to pop out and play a few holes here and there, but if you squint your eyes just right, you can also pull some deep philosophical meanings out of Desert Golfing. No joke.
There are even more examples, but the bottom line is that Justin Smith makes games that look almost laughably bad on the surface but always have some sort of hidden meaning and depth. I don't know if that's on purpose or a happy accident but either way his library of games is a gift to us gamers. The latest Justin Smith release is Freeways [$1.99], a traffic management sim of sorts, and like his previous games you can't judge this book by its cover. Your job is to con...