Threes! [$2.99] hit the App Store in early 2014 and was met with universal critical acclaim. (We loved it in our review.) About a month later, Ketchapp released 2048 [Free] and the rest is history. 2048 massively surged in popularity because it was way easier than Threes! and, well, it was free. The unbelievable success of 2048 caused two things to happen: Everyone and their third cousin twice removed released their own 2048 clone which then resulted in everyone who covers video games on any level setting up email filters to automatically delete any email with "2048" in it. Anyone who was a mobile gamer in 2014 undoubtedly remembers how bad it got. Everything was either Flappy or 2048, and most, if not all of these games were just objectively bad. It's important to give this history lesson to put into context what happened next. A friend whose opinion I respect on these sorts of things randomly hits me up out of the blue to say he's obsessed with a game called Dead 2048 [Free]. I watch the three little dots typing indicator waiting for the punch line to what simply must be some kind of joke. Instead, an enthusiastic description followed. Puzzled, and fairly confident I was being trolled, I gave Dead 2048 a download and I honestly can't believe what I found: A spin on 2048 that's actually pretty interesting.

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So in 2048, you slide tiles around to increment numbers to finally get to the highest tile in the game: 204...