Apple Arcade’s best selling point: Games you’ll actually want to play

At its best, Apple Arcade will encourage developers to cut loose and get weird. Take Sneaky Sasquatch from RAC7: You play as the aforementioned Bigfoot wandering around a forest and stealing food from campers picnic baskets. All the while, you’re avoiding the nefarious park ranger, Yogi Bear-style. While it looks like an Animal Crossing-inspired title at first, the game eventually opens up in wild new ways. You’ll be able to drive cars into town, wear human clothes to fool people (except that darn park ranger!) and even go skiing in a mountain resort. (The latter brings to mind the classic Windows game SkiFree, except now you’re the sasquatch zooming down slopes.)

RAC7 also developed a unique puzzle game, Spek, where you rotate three-dimensional levels to collect fragments of a lost dimension (okay, they just look like dots). It’s a simple idea at first, bringing to mind the likes of Fez, but it looks addictive. There’s also an augmented reality mode, where you can physically walk around the puzzle to collect pieces. And unlike other AR games, like Angry Birds, you don’t need anchor it to a flat surface. The puzzle will just float in the air, like a virtual chandelier. (Spek looks like something that would be perfect for the rumored Apple AR headset.)

These games alone make Apple Arcade seem like a no-brainer subscription for anyone with an Apple device. It’s $5 for the entire family — the price of many individual mobile games — it already has a handful of strong titles, and you can easily play across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. Apple needs to maintain the stream of quality of games, and could very well raise the price eventually, but for now, Apple Arcade seems like one of the best deals in gaming.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.