Two Dots is a sequel to Dots, both great games about, well, dots. You connect dots, draw squares through dots, remove dots in a way so that dots line up. So, yes, there’s dots, cascading in ways that flex your mind in colorful patterns, bouncing playfully as they drop into an invisible rectangle container, filling it with green, yellow, and red polkadots. 

But what you really care about is not the dots, per se, but that the dots are a perfectly desaturated hue, that the game is simple and elegant, that the play field is centralized in “the thumb zone,” that the whiteness of the screen doesn’t clash with the whiteness of your phone’s shell, that when the person sitting next to you glances down at what you’re doing they see a minimalistic and sophisticated looking puzzle game and not Candy Crush Saga.

This is a worthy aspiration when choosing a mobile game. It’s a given that you’re half paying attention and killing time, so you might as well have class. The best mobile games get this right. 868-Hack goes great in a dimly lit piano bar. Threes! is not the go-to-game when you want to binge out, I don’t think. And Two Dots is clearly a game that cares about being a well designed object, while at the same time not wanting you to think that the developers stressed themselves out over that pleasing “dum-dum-dum” sound effect when you match three dots.