‘I did not expect so many games about people’s pets’: why Downpour is a great alternative to doomscrolling

A simple and endearing game creation tool has me and thousands of others creating little shareable interactive games instead of pawing at the news on our phones

Last week, while slowly suffocating on a packed train from Frome to London, I took out my phone and instead of doomscrolling social media, I made a game. It was an extremely basic game that required the player to correctly identify Westminster Palace's Big Ben tower in a photograph, but the experience was so engrossing that the journey flew by.

The app I used to build my masterpiece was Downpour, by lone coder v Buckenham. Launched on App Store and Google Play last week, it's an intuitive program that lets you build games out of your own photos. You simply create a collage of images, add some text and save that as a page; you then add more pages and link them together to create your game. Transparent boxes on the screen form the hyperlinks - so say you use a photograph of Westminster, you can place a box around the Elizabeth Tower and when the player touches it, they'll be led to a page that says Congratulations, you've found Big Ben".