Somebody let the zombies out, and they're on a serious rampage to get rid of the survivors! Shelter is a post-apocalyptic strategy game from Survivalist Games that distills all the running, shooting and getting your brains eaten action from surviving a zombie raid into a card game. It's surprisingly challenging and calls on more skill than just being able to place a few cards on the table. And just because zombies busting down the doors happens with cards doesn't mean it's any less thrilling.

The game takes place on a map where you can accept missions by tapping colored pins. Enter a duel and you'll see a spread with the zombies on the top and the survivors below. The gist of these battles is you're in a shelter and the zombies are trying to get in. By playing cards from your hand or using cards from the board you can barricade the doors, reinforce the structure, or do some good old fashioned zombie splattering. Turn them into gray goo and you can call it a win. But if the zombies deal you 50 damage, it's game over.

The artwork in Shelter looks as if it were ripped straight out of a graphic novel, which is a fantastic fit for the game and setting. The difficulty slowly increases as you work your way through the map, forcing you to be more frugal with your actions and refine your deck to a true zombie killing machine. Er, defending-from machine. The game's a little slow to begin, especially with the lengthy tutorial text that keeps popping up to explain every detail about playing, but it soon picks up and will have you hooked for hours. Despite one or two awkward interface moments, Shelter is a challenging and creative card-based strategy game that's sure to give you your zombie fix!

Imagine a record spinning around, and you'll have a feel for what Soundodger from OneMrBean (Michael Molinari), is like. What's that? You don't know what a record is? How old are you anyway? Does your mom know you're on the internet? Well as long as you're here, you might as well play.

In this musical avoidance game, the object is to keep away from the arrows and other shapes created by the songs. Projectiles continuously shoot out at you in time to the music, and you can shift into slow motion to help avoid these. Use your mouse or the [arrow] keys to control yourself. Click or press [shift] to slow down time, and press the escape key to pause. Your score is presented in terms of percentage of bullets dodged. Any arrows that hit you, or that exit the screen while you are in slow motion, detract from your score. A small circle begins in the middle of the screen and grows larger as the song progresses, giving you a sense of how much longer the song will last. A lightly tinted circle inside that circle gives you an idea of your score as you go along. Earning percentage points allows you to unlock more songs.

Soundodger's nothing if not pretty. You could fall into a trance-like state just enjoying the patterns the songs bring with them. But good looks are not all there is to like. While the gameplay isn't exactly innovative, the controls handle nicely and the ability to slow down time (and the music) is fun. There are plenty of interesting songs to keep you playing in a variety of styles, though they tend toward the chiptune. Once you've played through a song, zen mode for that track is unlocked. While the whole game has a zen vibe to it, during zen mode you don't take any damage. It's a way to experience the songs and patterns they make without having to worry about survival. Go ahead and turn your speakers up, your lights down, and take the game for a spin.

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The floor is lava! And so are the walls, the ceiling, the curtains and the coffee tables. This is the premise of Maze Evolution, a sweet new puzzle game where you have to reach the finish line without touching anything.

To start a level, click on the little black star. From that point on, the star is bound to your mouse and follows its movements, so be very careful. If you so much as graze a pixel in one of the walls, you'll end up with a big, humiliating "FAIL" all over your screen. The first few levels go easy on you and serve as a kind of tutorial but, after that, you're on your own. The game's most appealing quality is that it's not static; rather, some levels respond to your movements and change as you go along. Others are moving all the time, and its up to you to catch up with parts of the maze, which makes them feel like a weird game of hopscotch. To make things more interesting, your poor little star gets occasionally shot at, so you must dodge black block bullets as well as navigate the maze. There are twenty-eight levels, each with its own quirks, but don't expect the difficulty to rise evenly. The levels are too diverse, so their individual difficulty depends a lot on your various skills and preference.

The best thing about Maze Evolution is how well the design fits in with the gameplay. The clean, two-colour scheme works perfectly in a precision game. The background colour changes as you play, but it's a subtle fading of muted shades which won't distract you. The overall effect is very stylish and a little retro, a joy to behold if you like minimalism, making it really easy to focus on the task at hand. So grab your best mouse and concentrate!

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You know, as a room escape enthusiast I just love a scenario where a friend/colleague/stranger locks me into a space and refuses to let me out or feed me until I've solved all the puzzles in the room. If you think that means I really, really love the escape games of Tesshi-e, well, you'd be right. If you think that means that there is something really, really wrong with me, well, you're also right, but that's besides the point. The point is that occasionally a person needs something more than just crisp visuals and clever puzzles in their escaping. Sometimes a person also yearns to need to put together random crap found in a room to construct something useful (that or a device in which to capture their kidnapper, either way is fulfilling). Good thing we have Escape from Tesshi-e's Room 2 to fill that void. (As of this writing, the game is currently Japanese only.)

The construction comes roaring back to the forefront in Tesshi-e's latest effort. Whether you love it, hate it, or love to hate it, construction is one of those type of puzzles Tesshi-e will return to again and again, perhaps not as frequently as the wobbly picture puzzle but often enough that it has become a hallmark. This game not only brings back this fun and frustrating puzzle, but brings it back in a big way. Aside from the complex series of mind-benders, Tesshi-e is mastering the art of multiple use objects, in that the handy and helpful items you find in the room have two or more uses, making the interconnections between puzzles even tighter and more entertaining.

Tesshi-e room escapes have always been fun, but it has been nice to see them progress from something slightly above average to the standout escape games they have become today. With their multi-layered puzzles and smooth controls Tesshi-e has earned the right to stand with the giants of the room escape field. With the usual two endings (the second featuring a very familiar restaurant), Escape from Tesshi-e's Room 2 continues the trend of point-and-click fabulousness that we've come to expect.

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Super School Day is a quick-fire collection of mini-games from Second Impact Games. It shares a lot with titles like Wario Ware and the classic 4 Second series, though this game is out to make a mockery of them at every turn. Each round drops handfuls of extremely fast micro-games in your face, challenging you to complete them as best you can before you're whisked off to the next one. You will feel lost, you won't know what's going on, you will yell and you will fail. But you'll be laughing the whole time because hey, there's a sea urchin school uniform!

To start out, pick a student. Each has his or her own personality that affects which games you play and how difficult they are. You are then thrown into the craziness that is your "typical" day of school, involving things like landing a UFO, playing dodge ball, racing down the hall with fire extinguishers in rolling chairs, destroying a car with Street Fighter-style moves, and eventually trying to stop a meteorite with your bare hands.

What makes Super School Day so fun is its over-the-top personality. It knows it's a mini-game collection and it doesn't care. It throws stuff at you left and right secure in the knowledge that you're going to fail at some point. But you'll have fun doing it! Unlocking different endings is great fun, and attempting to perfect each challenge will take some work. This is a day at school, after all. You didn't expect to just show up and dance to a song about a giraffe, did you?

Akaw-akaw-akaw-akaw... That's the sound of Nam-Cap, an innovative retro arcade game from Studio Piña. Billed as an arcade cabinet imported from an alternate universe, Nam-Cap takes the familiar concept of Pac-Man and turns it backwards in many ways.

You play Nam-Cap, the titular heroine. Use the [arrow] keys to navigate the maze, leaving a trail of dots behind yourself. Your goal in each level is to fill the whole maze with dots (as opposed to consuming them all, obviously), but two catches make this task substantially difficult. The first catch is that the heart in the center of the maze will shrink as you lay dots, and if it disappears completely you can lay no more.

You can prolong or recover your dot-dropping privileges by catching one of the four kings that also wander the maze, forcing it to scramble back home to recover its crown. (Why kings instead of ghosts? I'm guessing it's so the spiky part can be at the top instead of the bottom.) However, that's where the second catch comes in: when you catch a king you leave a small heart behind, and if a king nabs that heart poor Nam-Cap will be temporarily weakened, not only unable to create dots but erasing every dot she passes over! Get caught while weakened by a king or at any time by the level-specific baddie, and you lose a life; lose all your lives and that's all she wrote.

The thing most people overlook about creating something set in an alternate universe is that it has to make sense within that universe, ignoring our own. Nam-Cap is a little uneven in that area; seeing the kill screen at the very beginning of the game is just odd, but on the other hand, "Work Began" as a substitute for "Game Over" makes sense because once you're done gaming, it's time to get to work. The developers might have just gotten lucky there, though.

But that's not what matters to us; what matters is how fun the game is, and this game is definitely fun. Despite the reversal, Nam-Cap captures everything that made Pac-Man entertaining, from the alternating pursuit towards and from the four other parties in the maze to the panic when you thought you'd finished the level but really there's one little spot of the maze you haven't gotten to yet. There are even little cartoons between some levels, like in the original arcade Pac-Man, although they make slightly less sense because they're attempted direct adaptions. The game has its inherent flaws, like confusion about what needs to be covered in dots and what doesn't, but those are easily overlooked in an otherwise entertaining game.

Are you ready? Excuse me... are you ABLE??

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You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Of course, I'm talking about the Candy Planet, and I Hate Candy. Or at least, the sullen mercenary hero of Cup of Fun's platforming shooter does, so it's bad luck for him that he's been sent to the sugary sweet world to rescue a bunch of scientists. Seems like candy might just hate him back, too, since the world is full of stuffed animals waiting to pelt him with the stuff, walls covered in sticky-sweet goo that make it impossible for him to climb, bottomless pits... not exactly a warm welcome. Use the [arrow] keys to move and hold [spacebar] to fire, keeping an eye on the temperature meter in the upper left corner so you don't overheat. Your goal is to find and rescue the scientist in each stage, blasting any toddling toys in your way and... uh... nabbing their souls for upgrades, which isn't creepy at all. You'll automatically grab onto and hang from any wall you jump against unless it's covered in slippery goop, so make sure to explore every part of each level to find all the power-ups and secrets.

Provided you don't find the idea of gunning down toys that actually seem to think they're doing you a favour by showering you with painful treats, there's something delightfully weird about the whole tongue-in-cheek premise, and the great design doesn't hurt either. The spiteful, grudging tone of the alien hero and the gleefully oblivious toy enemies clash in a great way It feels like a few minor tweaks would really have gone a long way towards making the game a lot smoother, however. A map to keep track of where you are in the enormous levels, for instance, and a bit more variety in the environments, which sadly wind up mostly looking and playing the same apart from a few minor style changes. Still, I Hate Candy is one of those games with such a great style and sardonic charm that it's still worth checking out. A remarkable amount of work has clearly gone into it, and though it's begging for a more fleshed out sequel, I Hate Candy is a fun, snarky platformer with a lot of levels to explore and blast through.

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It's time to get a little dark and griddy! And by that, I mean, this week in the JayIsGames Vault, we're featuring some of the greatest grid-based games for you to gleefully go and grok. It's so hip to be square!

• Back to the Cubeture: Era 1 - Confession time: this fair reviewer had actually never come into contact with EdibleCastle's humorous Cuboy before encountering this 2009 point-and-click game. But, as advertising methods for your flash cartoon series goes, putting together a hilarious isometric adventure where a cheerfully oblivious protagonist turns the world of the wild west into his whimsical playground has to be among the best. Polished, hilarious, and unabashedly oddball, Back to the Cubeture: Era 1 will definitely put an angular smile on your face.
• Gridz - Originally this puzzler by Atomic Cicada was released merely as "Grid", before being semi-sequeled semi-remade in 2009 with a "z" attached to the end of the title. And that added little bit of EXTREME SPELLING made all the difference, since Gridz is a true classic. It's a joy to see how the mish-mash of presented pipe-segments coalesces into an elegant solution. Perhaps it's just my latent OCD coming through, but when I'm somehow able to put order into the chaos of each of Gridz's forty levels, I get the sense that things are somehow being made right in the world.
• Grid Game - Finally, before this edition of The Vault goes off the grid, I'd like to share with you this charming little chain reaction webtoy. Released by Mark James in 2005, Grid Game feels like it would be as at home on your office-top desk as it does on your computer screen. The simplicity of clicking a cell, which then rotates a cell next to it, rippling out in a cascade of clicks and chirps is strangely beautiful. The "high score" function was definitely a devious inclusion on the part of the developer, since it just about guarantees that I won't be able to stop playing until my coffee break has well and truly disappeared in a flurry of rotating circles. Totally worth it.

While we welcome any comments about this weekly feature here, we do ask that if you need any help with the individual games, please post your questions on that game's review page. Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and rediscover some awesome!

Little Luca from Glowingpine Studios is a unique one button physics puzzle game that puts you in control of a bunch of floating colored things that change shape. Really! As two friends gazed upon the peaceful night sky something terrible happened. Stars fell from their perches, leaving behind a glowing red void. And the only person/creature that can set things right is you. Time to get wobbling!

Levels in Little Luca are filled with objects the game itself describes as "wibbly-wobbly morphing" things. All you have to do is touch the forms to change their shape, using momentum and physics to catapult around the stage to collect stars and make it to the exit. Each shape morphs in a different manner when activated, leaving you some room to experiment and practice your timing before you get a perfect score. In later levels you'll unlock new things to play with, including gravity wells, tractor beams, whales, and maybe even a volcano.

The music and artwork in Little Luca deserves a mention, as both are spectacular in their own right. The game is a bit on the challenging side, but because everything in the world is so happy and cheerful, you never get frustrated, just motivated. Getting the hang of Little Luca takes some time, as it isn't your usual puzzle game by any means. But it's got all the ingredients of a solid mobile release, and you'll happily sit down and poke each little wobbly blob until the sky is filled with stars once again!

He ain't Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All, but we love him just the same. He's Bustermcthundersticks, and he so happens to be a point-and-click puzzle game by Ninjadoodle, where the aim is to track down 33 tiny ninjas hiding throughout a house filled with tricks and puzzles. To play, just point, click, and drag to interact and keep your eyes open for clues that will tell you how to use the devices in each room.

Bustermcthundersticks is a weird name for an even weirder game, but it makes for a great snack-sized piece of puzzling that won't weigh you down... though you will have to contend with getting that soundtrack stuck in your head. While a few of the ninjas are simple reflex grabs, tracking down the others requires both an eye for detail and deciphering contextual clues that at first glance either don't make much sense or seem like simple decoration. Some of the puzzles are definitely more obscure than others, so don't be afraid to experiment or bang on walls if you need to. Short, stylish and sweet makes for a great casual gaming trifecta, and Bustermcthundersticks is another welcome little gem from Ninjadoodle to brighten your day. Now if you excuse me, I have to go inform my husband about his new nickname.

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In-Finity's Sokoboom may look all sweet and innocent, but this simple puzzle game hides a devious difficulty curve... you may want to take the dark circles around our protagonist's eyes as a warning, because he's clearly been up all night with this one. Using [WASD] or the [arrow] keys, push each crate into a square on the floor with an X in it to open the portal to the next level. That's all. Easy, right? But despite not tacking on a lot of bells and whistles, Sokoboom's tight level design will tie your brain in knots. The downside is that the undo button, which only undoes a single move, feels too restrictive to really be useful, since unless you're going slowly and methodically it's far too easy to accidentally push a single block a few steps too far and be forced to restart the entire stage... which, considering how tidy and intricate the levels become, can be very frustrating. But with a clean presentation, Sokoboom serves up the sort of well thought out puzzling that shows you don't need a lot to be challenging. Just your wits... and apparently to have your hair styled by Javier Bardeem in his No Country For Old Men phase.

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Biology was never my strong suit in school. All those mitochondria and phylums and mitosis... meh. Luckily, you don't have to know your genes from your jeans to make it through Life Sciences, a new room escape by Rose Key. The game takes place inside your standard, four-walled room decorated with the theme of — you guessed it — life sciences. Make your escape, or be forever trapped amongst pictures of parameciums and DNA!

It's a simple but charming affair, and no heavy science knowledge is required for success — most of the puzzles are color-based. While some clicking areas are mildly fiddly, a changing cursor alleviates most of the pixel-hunting woes. The puzzles are definitely on the easier side, but they still have a nice logical flow, making for the perfect little coffee break escaper. So grab your bunsen burners and your graduated cylinders and try to make your way out of the room of Life Sciences!

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