Honkai Star Rail takes the cake for Apple's best mobile game of the year

Apple announced its App Store Award winners yesterday, rounding up the best apps and games from across 2023, with Honkai Star Rail coming out on top.

Another year, another batch of games to give awards to. This time, specifically for games on Apple's App Store, which had 40 finalists selected for its best apps and games of the year. On the iPhone game of the year front, Honkai Star Rail was up against Vampire Survivors and Afterplace, but it took home the gold as the best mobile game of the year. Of course, Apple has a few other platforms its games are available on, which had their own respective winners.

The iPad game of the year went to Lost in Play, a picture-book-like adventure game from Snapbreak Games, beating out Eggy Party and Pocket City 2. Slightly higher in profile is Pinocchio Souls-like Lies of P, from Neowiz, which took home the award for best Mac game of the year (an award our review might disagree with, though I personally can see why). Lies of P managed to beat out games like Elex 2 and Return to Monkey Island, so it did have a bit of competition. Lastly, the best Apple Arcade game of the year is Hello Kitty Island Adventure from Sunblink, an Animal-Crossing-esque title.

There were also a few cultural impact winners in the games department this year, including the digital toy room game Pok Pok, Xbox Game Pass gem Unpacking, and hidden-object game Finding Hannah.

Coming from the same developer behind Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail launched earlier this year, and very quickly found popularity. That popularity has continued through to its recent PS5 release, which managed to hit one million players in about a month. It's also a game that does a very good job of rekindling those memories of top of the line PS2 RPGs, which is never a bad thing.