The Kingdom of Fredicus is a place that loves its heroes. Unfortunately, Reemus, exterminator extraordinaire and overshadowed brother to the local dragon slayer, is having trouble convincing that populace that he deserves a little undying adulation. Sure, later in life he'll have Several Journeys to prove his bravery against invading death slugs. Right now, though, it's early in his adventure gaming career, and even after his first minimal-property-damaging bug slaying, he's have trouble getting people listen to the glorifying ballads written by his faithful bear companion, Liam. So a-questing he goes, in search of glory, gratitude, and, most importantly, a soft bed. It's The Ballads of Reemus: When the Bed Bites, the first premium downloadable adventure game in the popular Reemus series, produced by Click Shake Games! And while the anticipation may have driven us all a little buggy, it was totally worth it.

Controls should be familiar to most point-and-click players. Click the screen to interact with objects, talk to other characters, or move Reemus and Liam around. If you wish to use an object in your inventory, click it, and then where you would like to attempt to use it. Occasionally there will be sections where Reemus and Liam split up. You'll switch between the characters by clicking the icon in the top right corner. The gear icon brings up the display and audio options, including whether you like voice acting, word balloons, or both. Your progress is automatically saved. Purchasing The Ballads of Reemus: When the Bed Bites grants you access to both the browser and download versions of the same game. Also available is a Special Edition featuring a signed CD of the game, a T-Shirt, Stickers, and the game's soundtrack.

Analysis: Developers making the leap from free to paid-for often face a hard-sell to the gamers of the internet. Succeeding requires the game to have ambition: ambition in aesthetics, in programming, in presentation, and in scope. Zeebarf and Steve Castro then, must be some heck-of ambitious designers, since The Ballads of Reemus is everything that the fans of the series could hope for. Like a well-made big budget TV show movie adaptation, The Ballads of Reemus has the familiar flavor and humor of the original series, but scaled-up and unafraid to fix what needs to be fixed.

First of all, the art of Reemus's world is absolutely awesome, typical for Zeebarf's work. It should be no surprise that the creator of The Visitor series knows how to design a score of ghoulishly wacky creatures, but it's his flora, not fauna which is the most interesting. Infusing personality into mere plant life cannot be an easy thing, but from the delicious looking Ice Cream Cactus, to the unappealing Halitosis Bush, to the unsettling Swamp Blisters, the world is populated with a forest of wonderful creations. Almost paradoxically, while the plotting tends more to the slice-of-life comedy genre than the epic-adventuring parody flavor of Journeys (at least at first), it makes the world feel bigger, not smaller. We get to see so many locations and meet so many characters that Fredicus becomes the kind of fantasy world that, like Discworld, feels lived-in, if that makes any sense: a place that, while fantastic and peppered with modern pop-culture jokes, makes you forget that it's a recently created place rather than something from a classic goofy fairy tale.

Of course, the shiniest graphics in the world would be lacking without the writing to back it up. On this point, The Ballads of Reemus, also shines. The dialogue is well-crafted and the characters all sparkle with personality. There is a funny response for nearly everything you would try to do, always a mark of developers that have taken their time to do a job right. The puzzles do have that shade of adventure game illogic to them (though the solutions often make a perfect skewed sense in retrospect, even when you've clicked them out by brute force). That said, the challenge level is low, and even if players get frustrated, its unlikely they'll be seriously stuck.

Another feature worth mentioning is the new inclusion of voice-acting, most of which is very good. Of course, they probably won't be the voices you have for the characters in your head, but they'll grow on you. This reviewer has already mentioned his desire for Josh Tomar to walk around and narrate stuff in his everyday life, but he delivers a manic performance as Reemus that is surprisingly fitting, and helps to keep the quicken the pace when the game needs it. The rest of the cast is no less impressive, especially Zeebarf himself as Liam, and Dave Dunham as Waldorf the Bard. On the other hand, the musical score, though it has a large number of tracks and the right eerie faux-medieval feel, can get repetitive, especially if you remain at a single screen to work on a puzzle for a long period of time.

The Ballads of Remus is the complete package, perfect for both fans and newcomers alike. It's just the right length for a ten dollar game, and with it's optional quests and easter eggs, will keep adventurers entertained for hours. Whatever the form you play it in, its charm will undoubtedly exterminate your boredom.

Play The Ballads of Reemus: Demo

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After her beloved Viggo is captured in spectacular fashion by a caped figure (rad) on horseback (radder) with a lasso (raddest), Christine turns to you for her assistance in tracking him down and rescuing him. Because both these two lovebirds were previously in the opera, it stands to reason everything they do must be done in the most dramatic way possible, so naturally Viggo has found a way to send Christine letters from his prison by trained pigeons. You find yourself led to the mysterious Blackhill Manor only to be swiftly separated from your companion and forced to go it alone. Will you succeed in rescuing Viggo and Christine? Or will you find yourself the next victim of the strange Black Widow of Blackhill Manor? Find out in Vast Games' hidden-object adventure Nightfall Mysteries: Black Heart, the sequel to Curse of the Opera and Asylum Conspiracy. Both of which, incidentally, you should have played before this so you know what's going on... but since they're two of my favourite casual download games of all time you've already done so, right? Right. Onward!

To save Viggo, you'll need to uncover the secret of Blackhill Manor (all manors are contractually obligated to have dark secrets) and his twisted family tree. Unlike most games, Black Heart offers three flavours of difficulty, including an unusual "extreme" choice that refuses to offer any help at all while you play. Hint and skip buttons make their usual appearances, but in most cases they're the only help you have as you go deeper into the twisted Blackhill Manor. Like any good villains, the bad guys here have gone to great extent to leave clues and even tape recordings around to aid you in your search for Viggo, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. You'll solve puzzles and hidden-object scenes, avoid attempts on your life more than once, and uncover the truth about one of the weirdest family trees you're likely to encounter.

Analysis: With its flair for high drama, soap-opera complex storylines, and ghoulish charms, Nightfall Mysteries has been a personal favourite series of mine for some time now. Black Heart, happily, continues the tradition and provides a solidly entertaining adventure that constantly throws new clues and scenes at you to keep you engaged. The whole design is beautiful and full of small touches both fantastical and macabre, like a wedding dress designed by Vera Wang, Tim Burton... and Dexter Morgan. Exploring and discovering the audio tapes is a lot of fun, especially since the voice acting this time around is actually quite good. Of course, at this point in the series, the narrative is more than a little convoluted. Despite how drastically it has deviated from its origins, this actually works in its favour by providing a campy but exciting and intriguing little thriller mystery. Plane crashes? Bloody bathtubs? Cowled and murderous gymnastic savants? Beats a stick in yer eye any day. (Who came up with that as an endorsement? What a silly thing to say. Moving on... )

If Black Heart has any real flaws, they're mostly the same technical quibbles the whole series has possessed, such as somewhat finicky click detection or item usage, and the somewhat disappointing "fuzzy" artwork that's nowhere near as sharp as you'd expect. The actual gameplay itself, for the most part, is solid, if standard. None of the item uses are particularly obtuse, but be prepared to use an item once, have it vanish, and then encounter an identical issue that needs a different item more than once. You know, typical adventure game stuff. The puzzles are all mostly stylized versions of concepts you're most likely going to have seen before, and hidden-object scenes are mostly balanced both in terms of difficulty and how often they crop up. Which, y'know, is probably a good thing if you're getting annoyed with "random garbage pile" item assortments in these scenes like I am.

Nightfall Mysteries: Black Heart doesn't really provide any innovation, but it marries story and gameplay better than most games in the genre out there. At around five hours for a leisurely playthrough, it's also a good length. While the perplexingly grainy visuals might be a turn off for some, those that stick with it will find an engagingly cheesy and dramatic adventure that's well worth your time. Give the demo and try, and then go and brush up on your pigeon taming/training skills. After all, these are skills we should all apparently know in an emergency. Bless you, Viggo.

Currently only the Collector's Edition is available. It contains a bonus chapter, art gallery, strategy guide, and more. Remember that Big Fish Game Club Members pay only $13.99 for Collector's Editions (or 2 club credits), and collector's editions count 3 card punches of 6 total needed for a free game.

Windows:
Download the demo
Order the full version

Mac OS X:
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Try Boot Camp or Parallels or CrossOver Games.

Get out your exercise mats and incense sticks, fellow yogis: It's Subtle Energy 2! Like it's predecessor, this sequel is an Auditorium-like puzzle game, where you direct streams of colored particles from lotus flowers to colored chakras, achieving totally zen-eriffic enlightenment on the way. Drag eyepieces and portals to the screen to redirect streams, and change colors by either blending streams in eyepieces, or bouncing them off of colored walls. Press play to energize your setup, and make sure your chakras get just the right amount of their color, lest they either blink out from spiritual starvation, or explode from too many positive vibes. Apart from an updated presentation, Subtle Energy 2 isn't much different from the original, which is just fine if you want more of the same flavor of zen puzzling. It's quick, and perhaps a little easy, but it sure is relaxing to watch colored pixels flow across the screen. Ahhh...colored pixels.

Play Subtle Energy 2

If you played Edible Castle's last Cuboy point-and-click adventure game, back in 2009, you may be wondering why it's taken them so long to release Back to the Cubeture: Era 2. Apparently, someone didn't send the developer the memo that sequels are supposed to be derivative and rushed out as soon as possible to grab the flaky eyeballs of Flash gaming fans before they wander off to some new thing. Instead, not only does Cubeture 2 feature the same excellent voice-acting, cheeky humor, and quirky art as its predecessor, but it's five times as long and offers a much more non-linear experience. If you haven't played the earlier game, the opening cutscene neatly summarizes it, so you won't be lost. In short: Cuboy ultimate friend good. Esquire Padrino nefarious cat bad. Suspiciously cardboard box-like time warper causing temporal chaos. Got it clear? Good. This time you'll be rollicking through Cubathens, a sort of boxy Roman/Greek mish-mash.

You'll use your mouse to play most of the game. If your cursor changes to a volume symbol, you can chat up the daft peasant, Olympian god, nasty little ginger girl or whoever it is. A downward claw icon means you can pick up an object and add it to your inventory. A gear icon is an indication that either the object itself can be used in someway, or you can use something from your inventory on it. Arrows at edges and doors can be clicked on to move between rooms. Your inventory screen (in the top right corner) allows you to change outfits, check on your quests, and combine (by dragging) or use (by double clicking) objects.

Play all the Back to the Cubeture games:

While the last game relied a little too heavily on your spacebar for its mini-games, Cubeture 2 features seven unique minigames, all of which can be played on their own from the main menu as well. Most of these are keyboard controlled, and range from a head-stomping gladiator platform battle, to jump-and-duck reflex tests, to... deity armpit hair munching. Look, saving the world isn't pretty, alright?

Analysis: If the idea of deity armpit hair munching makes you purse your lips and shake your head about kids today, and you are not one bit amused, no sir, then Cuboy isn't going to be your thing. At the same time, however, the game is not a dull crass-fest resorting to sex and body function humor to cover up a lack of wit. Rather, the game has an infectiously cheerful enthusiasm for the ridiculous.

The game also gets everything right from a game play perspective. The interface is ridiculously user-friendly, and the in-game tutorial shows you clearly how to use all of it. Skippable cut-scenes (well, except for one hilarious counterexample), easy muting, a quest list that provides gentle hints, no pixel hunting: the game thought of all the pet peeves of point-and-click fans and forestalled them. This is just pure (if occasionally hairy) silly fun, so box yourself into your seat and enjoy it.

Play Back to the Cubeture: Era 2

Well, we've got some good news and some bad news. The opposite of the non-good news first: so many promising games hiding just below the horizon! Also, so many cool things going on for gamers to enjoy! The not-opposite of the non-good news: mobile companies are still ripping off small indie dev by stealing their ideas. Chocolate and cookies can't made the sadness that news brings us go away. But... it can help!

Get Excited: Cubes are Everywhere A few building games you should keep an eye on in the coming months. First up: Castle Story, a game that looks to combine elements from Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft into a great-looking simulation sort of game. Start with a few Bricktrons and help them stockpile resources and build castles to defend themselves from the bad guys. No release date has been announced, but it's never too early to start salivating. Next up is Cube World, a game that may look like Minecraft but is actually more of an open world RPG with heavy sim elements. The latest bit of news is the addition of pets (yay!) and two new mobs, including frogs and moles! No release info for Cube World either, but, again, happy happy joy joy!

New album from VVVVVV Composer Souleye If you enjoyed the music of VVVVVV as much as we did, you'll be psyched to hear that the composer has just released a new album, Adventure, that includes all-new material alongside remixes from the VVVVVV score. It's 20 tracks of chiptune-sounding goodness, and it'll probably make you want to go on an adventure yourself!

A Serious Bundle While we're still pretty burned out on indie game bundles, the thriving masses of players who love them are still out there, and bundle bundlers are hard at work bundling more bundles for everyone to enjoy! This time around, the Indie Royale folks have packed together a bunch of Serious Sam games (including a few by indie developers) for the low price of "whatever you wanna pay". The games represent a wide variety of genres, from RPG to shooter to Canabalt-style running game. This also sets off the site's series of lightning bundles that will be on sale for around 100 hours and promote niche titles. So, if you want 'em, get 'em fast!

Terraria Collector's Edition Box Announced Here's a little something for collectors and everyone who enjoys real, physical objects. Terraria Collector's Edition has been announced for a March 16 release in the UK. For just under £20, you get a physical copy of Terraria, a poster, trading cards, a key ring, and an exclusive in-game item. No word on a North American release, but having a handsome product like that on your shelf certainly seems appealing!

Return of the Attack of the Clone Wars Familiar with the wonderful NimbleBit game Tiny Tower? Most people are, it was only named as iPhone Game of the Year 2011 by Apple. Well, it looks like the clone-master folks at Zynga have decided to take the Tiny Tower concept, put some new visuals on it, and release it as their own game called Dream Heights. Not only does this game copy the exact layout and structure of Tiny Tower, it also comes months after the company attempted to buy out NimbleBit studios but was turned down. In other words, if you won't let us buy you, we'll use our superior resources to take your game anyway. Not cool, Zynga. Not cool. Check out NimbleBit's response, which is both informative and snarky, then read our previous article Cloned Mobile Games Hurt Indie Developers.

In the world of escape-the-room games, some names have risen to the top of the charts, are always sure to please the crowd and bask in the rays of fame here at JayIsGames. But the spotlight of celebrity brings both adoration and imitation, the sincerest form of flattery. Give you one guess who Find the Escape-Men #25: In Mr. EM's Room is spoofing.

In this case, you must point-and-click your way around the room, finding clues to puzzles and uncovering No. 1 Game's ten hidden green escape men before ultimately making your way out. Yet if you call yourself a fan of the genre, these surroundings should seem very familiar to you. Yes, it's all here—an enigmatic "he" who issued you the invitation, photo-realistic graphics, the wobbly picture frame puzzle and, of course, a happy coin—all the trademark characteristics which so uniquely, so unmistakably belong to... are you still guessing who? Only the smooth jazz is missing; get around that by opening one of the archetypes in the background to listen to while you play this.

The enjoyment of Find the Escape Men #25: In Mr. EM's Room is not only in solving the fun puzzles or encountering the odd logic (um, salty green cheese, anyone?) there is a special insider feeling from participating in a heartfelt parody of one of our most beloved game developers. You'll be left with an increased appreciation for the original's artistry and may even be tempted to replay the classics which inspired the copy.

Play Find the Escape Men 25: In Mr. EM's Room

Need a dash of rainbow splashed across your logic puzzles? Conceptis delivers a cacophony of colorful curiosities with Color Pic-a-Pix Light, the latest addition in their Conceptis Light series. You might be familiar with Pic-a-Pix puzzles from their previous selection, or perhaps you've tried Picross puzzles elsewhere. This new batch adds the twist of color, meaning the logic gets more twisted, and the solutions more dazzling!

If you're familiar with black-and-white Pic-a-Pix puzzles, you know the goal of each puzzle is to form a picture within the grid, using the numbers along the left and top of the grid as clues. The numbers tell you how many consecutive filled blocks appear along that row/column, with at least one space in between each string. However, unlike strictly black-and-white puzzles, color Pic-a-Pix puzzles add one tweak to this rule. While there still has to be one empty space between consecutive strings of the same color, there doesn't have to be a space between consecutive strings of different colors. Thus, a string of four red blocks can bump up against a string of two blue blocks if need be. By combining the horizontal and vertical clues to deduce where colored blocks must go, you can produce a picture that indicates you've solved the puzzle.

This puzzle pack comes with thirty puzzles, ten each of three different sizes. Perhaps surprisingly, this puzzle pack holds a very broad range of difficulties, ranging from solvable in twenty seconds (like the smaller 5x5 puzzles) to fifteen minutes (the larger 15x15 puzzles... although I must concede it's possible that I'm just a slow solver in some instances). Whatever your level of expertise, Conceptis once again brings a handful of puzzles perfect for familiarizing yourself or re-embracing the world of color Pic-a-Pix.

Play Color Pic-a-Pix Light

Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet. Roy G. Biv. Remember that name, folks, since you'll be dealing with with every pigment of your imagination in Colin Brown's puzzle platformer, Coloraze.

Centered on the mechanic of changing your color to interact with different objects, Coloraze is a simple concept done well. It's one of those works where a string of gameplay elements are introduced in the beginning, then paid off in the long run with a string of puzzles where they collide in interesting ways. The symbolic graphics are minimalist, but evocative. Like a TI-83+ hacked to have a color screen, they have retro-future feel to it that's very cool. Each individual level won't take too much time to play, but with a good ninety included, plus a solid number of levels made by the community using Coloraze's solid level editor, you won't be running out of game any time soon. The lack of concessions to the colorblind is unfortunate, as is the odd behavior that causes the game to seize up for a bit upon completion of a level, but overall, Coloraze is a red-letter game that deserves the blue ribbon.

Play Coloraze

Flex your carpentry muscles and laugh in the face of physics in Wood Worker, airomagic's new stacking physics puzzler offering. Click and drag a variety of wooden pieces into position, figuring out the best way to pile them into a relatively stable design while also attempting to collect blue stars and avoid pesky red ones. In order to successfully complete a level, your design has to, well, stay level for five suspenseful seconds and utilize every building piece provided. While wooden pieces can be repositioned as many times as you'd like, metal ones can't be moved once in place and are not affected by gravity, allowing them to function like anchors to help keep your wobbly design standing. The occasionally provided nail can be hammered into a wooden piece of your choosing to turn it into an anchor as well.

New version is now up: disables the parallax background scrolling that a few of you complained about in the comments.

Wood Worker may seem simplistic in theory, but the puzzles are really quite clever. The extra element of building to avoid certain objects while being required to reach others really adds a level of difficulty to the game. The physics are graceful and forgiving, too, with each piece behaving as you'd expect it and moving slowly enough that there's time to prevent a disaster before it happens. An uncooperative piece can be dragged back to the top of the screen and will stay there until you decide you need it again, which is a nice feature in that it prevents that helpless feeling of watching everything you've worked so hard to achieve topple over after one misplaced piece, leaving you no choice but to sit there and weep. On top of that, the graphics are charming and even cute at times (the pause screen, for example), plus the music is perfectly suited to this type of game; catchy but never grating and, even after failing the most frustrating puzzle for the tenth time, I never went scrabbling for the mute button. All in all, Wood Worker is the perfect chance to redeem yourself for that failed wood shop class, but with fewer splinters!

Play Wood Worker

It's time for a mid-week relaxation break, and in the world of room escape games there's nothing more relaxing than Tomatea. Well, relaxing if you can figure out their puzzles, that is, and this time Tomatea has come up with a doozy of an escape in After Rain, a game that will simultaneously soothe and frustrate you at the same time, which is quite a feat.

What happens after rain? If you're thinking floods or mud you'd be right, but not on the right track, at least with this room escape gem. After it rains, if you're really lucky, a rainbow will appear, and that's the phenomenon that After Rain is about. As you might imagine, this is not a game for the colorblind, as nearly every puzzle involves color to some degree. However, if you're not frightened off by the numerous hues and shades that permeate this charming room, then you're in for a delightful treat that is a feast for the eyes and the brain. Navigate by the usual arrows, find things with the lighted changing cursor, solve a ton of color puzzles, and you too can enjoy the refreshing feeling of going out after the rain and enjoying the wonder of mother nature.

Tomatea has outdone themselves with this amazing and delightful little game, packed full of use of found objects, letter puzzles, number puzzles, and some other treats that we won't spoil. It's time to dive into this amazing new room escape and, well, taste the rainbow (yes, the pun had to be made, shut up!).

Play After Rain

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "What if Mario was a fat penguin who could freeze things with snowballs and then turn them into delicious frozen treats by touching them?" Well, have we got a surprise for you! Neutronized's Snow Tale is an adorable, pudgy little platformer that takes classic Super Mario World-esque gameplay and dresses it up with a little of that old vaguely Hammerfest-ish flair. Now that's what I call da magicks! Just use the [WASD] or [arrow] keys to move, and the [sapcebar] to throw snowballs at enemies; once that freezes them, you can waddle into them to send them flying, Koopa-shell style, and they'll take out any other enemies in their path. You can only take three hits, but don't worry; you'll simply respawn at the last bell you rang and continue on your way to the end. Sign posts along the way will educate your further in the art of being a fat penguin, such as the double-jump, the bashing roll, and the all-important butt-stomp. (Don't leave home without it.)

Snow Tale has a lot going for it, not the least of which is its beautiful sense of style and eeeeee omigosh lookit the widdle baddies! Neutronized always makes gorgeous games and Snow Tale is no different. The looks go perfectly with the classic jump-and-bump gameplay... which unfortunately is only ever particularly challenging when it feels like the double-jump falls asleep on you. The whole movement feels just ever so slightly sluggish in a way that makes you want to go, okay, we get that he's a fat penguin, but even Wario was light on his creepy little feet. Still, Snow Tale does a great job of delivering family-friendly platforming action in one colourful, cartoony package that's just the right size and squishy shape for some coffee-break gaming. Or any time, really. Who am I to tell you how to enjoy your penguins?

Play Snow Tale

Following in the footsteps of other series like Castaway and Bloons, Axis Games brings their Hands of War RPG series into a new genre in Hands of War Tower Defense. Place towers! Defeat the enemies! Defend the lands! Okay, there's nothing earth-shatteringly new here, but what Axis Games has done, they've done right!

As a simple, lowly page, you have been given the Heartstone, a most powerful relic (which seems lifeless in your hands), and tasked to reunite the land of Tempor. Buck up, young man, it's time to prove yourself! After selecting a map to play, place the champion on the screen as the first 'tower' (warriors go on the path while mages and rangers go to the side, just like the actual units). From then on, you are free to spend your money to distribute the rest of the towers available to you, some on the path like the champion, and some along the sidelines, as in a traditional tower defense. Each wave is manually started with a click of the mouse, and once the enemies have appeared, you can sit back and watch the killings or stick your hand in and activate some of your mighty abilities.

Hands of War Tower Defense offers a neat storyline to go along with some great tower defense gameplay. The underlying game is on the easy side, but with all the handicaps available to add to a level, you can adjust the difficulty to your liking. Probably the strongest point of this game is the level of customization. Each unit's priority can be changed to just about any one you would like, and the champion, as the most powerful unit, has even more possibilities (I've got my eye on you, stealthed baddies!). You unlock levels a few at a time, so are free to play them in whatever order you'd like as well as replaying previous levels (for both more stars and the occasional challenge). It's a fun experience and one in which you'll likely drain a couple of evenings away!

Play Hands of War Tower Defense