Half mind-bending puzzle game, half minimalist electronic music box, Cadence will test and tickle your brain in equal measure. Each of its 50+ levels consist of a grid of tiles that you’ll need to wire together to create a circuit, send a signal and awake a sleeping cat called Ren. The tiles come with increasingly complex requirements to allow passage, such as needing two signals to reach a tile simultaneously, forcing you to become increasingly creative.

What we love: Alongside the game’s dozens of built-in levels, Cadence also includes a full-featured level-editor for you to build your own puzzles and by extension minimalist music tracks.

Quick tip: If you ever get stuck, it can be helpful to work backwards. Start with Ren, and work out which tiles the signal will need to pass through to get to him in one piece. Often levels that appear filled with different routes are far more linear than they first seemed.

Meet the creator: Developing Cadence has been a 13-year labour of love from solo developer Peter Cardwell-Gardner, who’d initially hoped it would be just a six-month project. One of the final features added were the little nuggets of wisdom dispensed by Ren the cat at the end of each level. “It’s impossible to work on a project for so long without facing some dark moments of self-doubt,” Cardwell-Gardner tells the App Store. “Ren’s voice is really everything I wish my younger self could’ve heard in those moments.”