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The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Monument Valley: Forgotten Shore, Framed, and much more

Super mega bonanza edition

The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Monument Valley: Forgotten Shore, Framed, and much more

Every Friday, Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's three best new iPhone and iPad games.

Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores
By ustwo - buy on iPhone and iPad (£1.49 / $1.99 if you have the original game)
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What the hell is wrong with you?

(Not YOU. YOU'RE brilliant. I'm talking to everybody else.)

Given that you've already paid £2.49 for ustwo's sublime Apple Design Award-winning puzzler Monument Valley, why do you begrudge paying £1.49 for another set of inventive, beautiful stages?

And why would the prospect of paying for a game send you running red-faced to the App Store to give it a 1-star review?

Well, the joke's on you, because Forgotten Shores is a terrific update, introducing clever new puzzles to its achingly beautiful Escher-esque world of hidden paths and mind-bending perspective shifts.

Ustwo is reportedly contemplating free-to-play in response to the criticism levelled at Forgotten Shores. If you ask me, things have come to a pretty pass when £1.49 is too much to pay for a game of this ingenuity and beauty. It goes without saying that you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves.
Stuck? Check out our Forgotten Shores walkthrough.

XCOM: Enemy Within
By 2K Games - buy on iPhone and iPad (£8.99 / $12.00)
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And yet, curiously, you didn't complain about XCOM: Enemy Within, even though it's also an expansion, and even though it costs six times as much as Forgotten Shores.

But on this occasion you were right – for once – not to complain, because Enemy Within is another brilliant expansion, albeit available as a separate download.

2K has taken the acclaimed XCOM: Enemy Unknown blueprint and embellished it with interesting new resources, items, and enemies, all of which boast new characteristics that significantly change the feel of the game and reinvigorate an already quite vigorous experience.

Framed
By Loveshack - buy on iPhone and iPad (£2.99 / $4.99)
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To call Framed hotly anticipated would be a quite staggering understatement. This clever puzzler has been in development for years, attracting a degree of anticipation previously reserved for the Large Hadron Collider, Virgin Galactic, and hoverboards.

The stages are presented as comic book pages, comprising several panes. Your task is to steer a briefcase-carrying silhouette to safety by rearranging the panes in order to create the optimal sequence of events.

Keep running into a policeman and getting a gun in the face? Simply move the panes around so that you appear behind the policeman. Can't fight off the copper who's jumped you in your flat. Simply put the pane with the bottle in it in front of the one with the copper in it. Wallop, you've got yourself a weapon.

I don't think Framed will be for everyone, but there's no denying the sheer style and inventiveness of Loveshack's game.

Stuck? Check out our Framed walkthrough.

PG Extras

It's been a hell of a week, so here are some of the other games we recommend picking up after you've burned through these.

Space Age: A Cosmic Adventure
By Big Bucket Software - buy on iPhone and iPad (£2.49 / $3.99)
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Charming genre-straddling adventure game set in space.

Here's a Space Age walkthrough.

Vainglory By Super Evil Megacorp - download on iPad (free)

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Super-polished MOBA from veteran team.

Random Heroes 3
By Ravenous Games - buy on iPhone and iPad (69p / 99c)
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Third in the highly acclaimed platformer series.

Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.