Subway Surfers

The endless runner that set the template for a decade of them. Three lanes, a speed that only increases, and four inputs — left, right, jump, roll — applied to trains, barriers and tunnels that arrive in arrangements you will eventually know by heart. The reason it endures is the quality of those arrangements. They are fixed sequences rather than random placements, which means long runs come from recognition rather than reflexes, and the late-game difficulty is about recognising a pattern from its first element while moving too fast to read the rest. The hoverboard gives you a few seconds of immunity on demand, which is the only recovery available and is best saved rather than spent on a comfortable stretch. Collected coins fund characters and boards that change nothing important, which is the right level of progression for a game whose appeal is the run itself. Runs last a minute or two and restarting is one press. It plays with swipes on a phone or four keys on a desktop and runs on very modest hardware. Still among the best in its format because the fundamentals were right to begin with.