Puzzle

Making something out of next-to-nothing

HIGH It's the pinnacle of electronic elegance.

LOW The difficulty of the extra stages verges on insanity.

WTF At only $6 for the download, it's an absurd value.

Game Description: Explore the universe like never before in Art Style: ORBIENT. Take control of gravity and antigravity to carefully maneuver your small star through 50 stages set in multiple galaxies. Collide with other stars to absorb them and make your own star expand in size, or capture the stars in your orbit and have them become your satellites. Space isn't empty though, and you'll have to avoid bumping into obstacles or getting pulled into a black hole. If you feel like relaxing while still being challenged, this is the game for you—its combination of simple controls, atmospheric sound, and unique environment make for an experience unlike any other!

Games in the Art Style series feature elegant design, polished graphics, and pick-up-and-play controls, creating an experience focused purely on fun and engaging game play.

The real mystery is... why is there no mystery?

HIGH Spotting hidden items is actually enjoyable in limited doses.

LOW The grinding repetition necessary to reach the game's end.

WTF Why is the country-western singer a vampire?

Game Description: Spot Clues to Find the rightful Heir! It takes a keen set of "private eyes" to identify the heir in this search-and-solve detective story. Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir presents a new generation of search-and-solve games for a new generation of Nintendo DS owners. Whether you like to play for minutes at a time or hours a day, Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir has your game experience covered. Delve into the latest evolution of search-and-solve fun! The game showcases highly detailed interactive scenes in which players look for cleverly hidden items in order to solve the case, an experience made for the added ease and interaction of stylus controls.

Calling something ‘hardcore' doesn't prevent it from sucking

HIGH Having a robot for a main character is always a perk.

LOW Everything else.

WTF The utter lack of a difficulty curve: it's all just this side of infuriating.

Game Description: In this DS remake of the classic Bangai-O, you take the roles of Riki and Mami and strap into the powerful Bangai-O suit to undertake the task of catching criminals red-handed. Bangai-O Spirits provides gamers with shooter gameplay and punishing supermoves, along with strategic and tactical elements. The game also offers co-op, competitive multiplayerfor 1-4 players via local wireless, and a powerful level editor tool which allows players to edit in-game levels or create new ones from scratch.

Soul Bubbles from French developer Mekensleep is a fantastic game for the Nintendo DS that is so polished in its presentation, so balanced in its difficulty, and so clever in its gameplay design that it effortlessly sails towards the top of the handheld's library, easily the equal of (or better than) even first-party Nintendo titles themselves.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Comic Mischief

Game Description: In Soul Bubbles you are a young shaman apprentice, who is entrusted with saving lost souls and guiding them to safety. You must protect these fragile beings from the hostile and dangerous world around them, and you do this by creating protective bubbles to keep the spirits safe. Manipulate your bubbles by first drawing them, then deflating them, cutting them or joining them to other bubbles, filling them with water or gas; then escape traps, extinguish fires and avoid all the sticky or dangerous surfaces that will slow the bubbles down. The game features 8 worlds, with over 40 levels to explore which will challenge the shaman in a variety of ways and push the physics capabilities of the Nintendo DS to the max.

After picking up a favorable critical reception at the International Games Festival, Audiosurf has been the indie flavor of the month on Steam, and rightly so. Ostensibly it is about veering a hovercraft left and right along a race track that undulates to the beat of your chosen song and collecting colored blocks for points, but the grid that those color blocks fall into turns the game into a kind of two-tiered puzzler. Keen racing reactions are needed to collect and correctly position high-scoring blocks of the same color into groups of 3 or more (after which, as you may have guessed, they will disappear).