Ember of the Hollow

Ember of the Hollow is the kind of RPG that respects your time without dumbing itself down. Battles are turn-based, so you can pause and think, and the auto-save means you can drop out mid-dungeon and come back later. The writing is surprisingly moody for a phone game, with a cast that actually grew on us over the first few hours.

Combat leans on positioning and a small but flexible skill tree. There's no filler grind forcing you to replay the same encounter twenty times, which is rare on mobile. Menus are a touch cluttered on smaller screens, but the game includes a scalable UI option that helped a lot.

Battery-wise it's a middleweight. Long sessions warm the phone and eat into the charge, so this is more of a couch-and-charger game than a quick bus trip one. Worth it for the atmosphere alone.

What we liked

• Thoughtful turn-based combat
• Genuinely good story and characters
• Scalable UI for small screens