About

Ember Pocket started as a group chat between three friends who kept sending each other screenshots of weird little games nobody else was talking about. At some point we figured we should just write things down properly, so here we are. We play on our own phones, on our own time, and nobody tells us what to say.

We care about indie and small-studio releases most of all, because that's where the genuinely strange and clever ideas usually hide. A game doesn't need a marketing budget to earn a spot in our catalogue — it needs to do something we haven't seen a hundred times already, or do a familiar thing unusually well.

Every review here means someone on the team actually sat down and played the thing, often for hours longer than they planned. We take notes on controls, pacing, how it feels on a smaller screen, and whether we kept coming back to it the next day. If a game bored us, we say so.

We're a tiny team, so we can't cover everything, but we try to spread across genres instead of just reviewing the same puzzle games over and over. Racing, RPGs, strategy, oddball adventures — if it runs on a phone and has a soul, we'll give it a shot.

Mikael Rantanen — Mikael has been reviewing mobile games since the days of resistive touchscreens and still plays far too much on his commute. He handles most of the strategy and RPG coverage and edits everything else.