From time to time, we see twists and turns on our genre-based expectations of games in order to provide a new experience. You may have played through games "from the villains' side", and enjoyed many a cerebral treat meant to test our definition of what a game is, but how many games have you seen where the win conditions are literally inverted? What if hitting the ball in baseball was the norm, and the only way you could win is if you could find some way to score outs? While Super Unbaseball 2010 may still be in development, here's an intriguing switcharoo on an old classic to tide us over: Gnop, from the gaming minds of Bit Battalion.

The controls are just as simple as the game's progenitor; [Up] and [Down] arrows steer the ball, though, instead of the paddles. It's up to you to navigate the fearless pixel around those persistent paddles, and into the next area, where a pair of smarter, more adroit defenders await your arrival. [Esc] restarts the game, and [M] mutes the noise. Aside from that, there's nothing to it except making your way from one "zone" to the next and planning daredevil maneuvers to get the projectile around your rectangular adversaries.

The whole game is very minimalist in its presentation as well as its controls, although one can't help but wish that there was some sort of figurative pat on the back at the end of the game. (Or a literal one. I'm not picky about back pats.) Perhaps some other elements could have been added, like more levels or "power-ups" or the like. But then again, giving the player anything more than the core idea and its bare-bones display would stifle the simplicity of the whole package, which comes across as one of the game's greatest strengths. And in the end, there's actually solid replay value to boot; I've been coming back to play it whenever I have five minutes to spare. So whether you've got some time to kill or you just want to ponder the ramifications of un-games (I would be SO good at un-bowling), this is a neat little surprise that fits right into your coffee break.

Play Gnop.

You really have to feel bad for ancient rulers of empires past. It's like, they stow every last artifact, relic, and jeweled chalice into gilded tombs just to keep them safe for the trip to the underworld, but they may as well just put a big, gleaming bullseye in the scarab motif on the front door. There will always be some ne'er-do-well, Stetson-clad treasure hunter with a glint of gold in their eye who can read five dead languages for no apparent reason and has their spelunking boots all laced up. Prepare for an adventure alongside one such hero in the latest platformer from JFlashGaming, Fortune Hunter: Wrath of Anubis.

The controls and setup are pretty much standard fare for a game of this type. Use the [arrow] keys to move, [space] to jump, tapping it again in the air to double-jump, and the [up] and [down] arrows to open doors and chests respectively. There's also some wall-jumping action involved, which is explained by the game when you'll need it. Other mechanics and the like will be explained as you explore level after level, trouncing baddies and collecting golden idols that allow you to move from one leg of the tomb to the next.

Platforming in this game is fairly tight, although occasionally the wall-jumping won't operate as smoothly as you'd like. There's also a brief learning curve in jumping on enemies' heads; the hit box is right on their insidious craniums, so make sure you bop them there and nowhere else. Once you're past those hiccups, however, the action's top-notch, and some of the trickier chests will require all of your platforming skill to locate. There's all manner of deadly traps and marauding mummies to keep you on your toes, and the retro-esque adventure style ought to keep you entertained for however long you decide to hunt for your fortune.

Play Fortune Hunter: Wrath of Anubis.

Whether they're behind museum glass or on a late-night TV special, from the East or the West or anything in between, let's face it: ancient empires fascinate us. They developed brilliant technologies, fostered rich cultures, and invented things like the concept of zero. The concept of zero, people. I still struggle with the concept of things like donuts. And the wars they waged! Oh, how their troops would blot the skies with clouds of arrows, and roaring fireballs would rain down to punish the unworthy. For all of you who don't remember that chapter of the textbook, the fine folk of Cave of Wonders Studios have decided to educate you with a historical, strategical free-for-all of the ages: Civilizations Wars.

Most levels consist of a rustic landscape, replete with uninhabited pieces of ancient real estate, plus an opposing army who feebly stands in your path to conquest. You're usually given a humble fort or two at the start which will generate reinforcements at a constant rate, indicated by a little number above the structure. Click on whichever outpost you'd like to deploy soldiers from, and then drag the cursor to your target and release. Half of that outpost's forces will be sent out to occupy the object of your ire. If the enemy resides within , the numbers will cancel each other out until either the building is successfully defended or your own subjects set up shop. In other words, the bigger number wins the battle, as long as stats (such as strength, defense, etc.) are equal. Mousing over many of your installments at once will result in coordinated attacks, which are often essential for overpowering a well-defended base.

There's more than just forts on every level, though; clever tacticians will make use of watchtowers to snipe at incoming foes, or crystal formations to increase your production of crystals, the mystical resource that powers spellcasting. Magic covers a wide range of uses, from natural disasters that scour the battlefield to enchantments that can protect property or defect enemies' troops to your side. All of these spells are learned via experience that is accrued at the end of every battle, which can be spent on mightier magic, garden-variety stat upgrades, or nifty passive abilities like faster magic cooldown.

The game's adventure spans many, many skirmishes, plus a few boss encounters with colossal creatures that ought to give your hard-trained military a run for their antique currency of choice. And even when you've felled the grandest of beasts, your campaign stretches on, until you'll find yourself pitted against some civilizations that you definitely don't remember from high school history. I won't give away anything else, but know that surprises are in store for the persistent general. To battle!

Analysis: We may have seen this mechanic implemented before, but Civilizations Wars pulls it off with pizazz to spare, plus some new ideas that help keep things fresh. The sorcery adds another dimension of strategy, and with structures that DON'T keep regenerating soldiers (like towers and crystal shrines), a player has to wonder whether sending more men to protect them is necessary or not. There are also multiple playable races; though their differences are mostly cosmetic (aside from slightly shuffled stats), it's little variations like those that add a unique flavor to the game, distancing it from its predecessors.

The difficulty curve, however, could have done with some tweaking. This reviewer staunchly refused to learn a spell other than the starter fireball for the entire game, and was able to steamroll over the opposition just fine on stat upgrades alone. There's really nothing wrong with that, but one wishes that if magic was going to be one of the defining facets of the game, that it would feel a little more vital to the process. I suppose you could call my approach one style of many, but conjured tornadoes and meteor showers just seemed so frilly when I had an army that could cleanly and efficiently reduce the enemy's army to nothing.

This is also a game with a very forgiving level select, which allows you to replay battles you've already trounced for more experience in case you've come up against an insurmountable foe. At certain experience milestones, new self-handicaps are unlocked (such as no spellcasting or poor visibility), and each one adds a healthy multiplier to your experience points at the end for your trouble. This is another mechanic that throws the difficulty curve; once you've become only decently strong, you can beat the first level with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your back. You can heap on as many inconveniences as you like, and then reap a gigantic experience bonus at the end. Again, this doesn't affect one's enjoyment of the game, but it doesn't give the player much incentive to replay any level for experience other than the first one with a ton of handicaps.

Still, this is a well-made strategy game with some adorable art and very appropriate, "ancient-y" sounding tunes. There's a cartoony charm in the game's world, which is usually (and understandably) absent from games that deal with historical fare. And even if it's not absolutely essential to the success of a campaign, the arsenal of spells is a ton of fun to monkey around with. So be done with your history textbook, because it's time to re-learn world history with a front-row seat.

Play Civilizations Wars.

Of the countless worlds and wonders that hold our fascination, few of them have captured, and in turn, galvanized our imaginations so much as that cold, black maw yawning on us from above: space. And why shouldn't it? It's fathomless, it begets over a billion hypothetical realities and counting, and it alone bears the emptiness required to entertain guests as brilliant as stars. The prospect of exploring all that nothingness is a bit daunting, raising some interesting questions that were at one time considered the purview of science fiction writers. Thankfully, there's now a work of interactive fiction that's got some of the answers: Rover's Day Out, Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman's winning entry in this year's IF Comp 2009.

The narrative begins with an itsy-bitsy clue that not all will be as it seems, followed by your character waking up in a fairly unadorned abode. From there, it's up to you as to what you do and how you go about it, because I can't say too much here without spoiling details. Know that your entire interactive fiction arsenal will be necessary (LOOK, EXAMINE, etc.) in order to proceed; some other unorthodox commands are useful for flavor information, but the nature of the orders you're expected to give are rarely too out of the ordinary.

Something that will quickly become quite apparent is the strange dialogue overlapping your actions, comments being made on your every move. Who are these strange watchers, and what could be their purpose? Why is it they seem to take interest in your performance of the most mundane tasks? And why do they consistently use really, really big words? Answers to all of these questions, as well as some of those loftier ones about space exploration will be answered, not to mention a couple others if you're lucky.

Analysis: Right off the bat, it's clear the writers aren't a couple of science-fiction lightweights. The more tidbits you find on the setting, the more you realize these guys did their homework (or read their Asimov, anyway). The superscience here all holds up quite well, and while sometimes it can get a little lost in the outlandish jargon that starts getting thrown around (particularly in the endgame section), the technology of it all begins to make sense the more you play.

And play you must, for I shall warn you now: the game will seem redundant at the start, once you figure out what you have to do and start the wheels turning. There's a decent chunk of the game where you'll be retracing steps and re-enacting commands, but please, ye faithful i-fictioneers, be patient! Things really get interesting the deeper you let yourself get drawn in, and there's plot turns and twists aplenty for an adventure that's relatively short.

Well, okay, the scope of the game isn't gigantic, as in someone with a walkthrough in front of them could shotgun through it at a quick clip, but some of the puzzles might require some good old-fashioned trial and error, while others are time-dependent and others happen in the midst of tension-wrought scenes. That's right, no resting on your haunches for you. This is a piece of interactive fiction that'll force you to think on the fly, think in terms you may not be familiar with, and do a whole lot of thinking in general. Truly, a worthy top contender of this year's competition.

Play Rover's Day Out.

To play this game, you'll need both the game file and an interpreter. Download Rover's Day Out from the Interactive Fiction Archive followed by an interpreter for your OS: Gargoyle for Windows, Zoom for Macintosh and Unix.

Of all the literature I used to discover off of elementary school reading lists, one book sticks in my head, even to this day: A Wrinkle in Time. To be honest, I'm rather murky on the plot details, my memory of the characters doesn't extend too far beyond a Mrs. Who (she was there, right?), and don't even ask me about the themes. But one illustration I remember quite well, in my particular edition: a character demonstrates how they can travel great distances in virtually no time at all. They produce an ant, and then goad it along a length of string like a tightrope. The character then brings the two ends of the string together, and presto! You've got a tidy explanation for an awfully complex phenomenon. Thankfully, a game has traded in the ants and string for an even simpler and more entertaining experience. Welcome to Continuity, an exquisite puzzler from Nils Stefan Bertil.

Every level contains a pristine red door, only usable for exiting purposes after one or more red keys have been collected. Sounds straightforward enough, but it's funny just how much this game will twist your perceptions of both straight and forward. All levels are composed of a number of squares, shiftable in a manner akin to a sliding tile puzzle. Each square contains a finite fraction of the overall level itself, and the key to victory lies in prudent transfigurations of the landscape.

The [arrow] keys shuffle the squares about in the all-encompassing view, while those same keys navigate your stick figure hero for platforming. Tap [space] to switch between those two perspectives, and that's just about it for controls. You can't just pair up any old squares; any black line/feature must continue seamlessly into the adjacent square you hope to travel to, or else your character will slam right into the border of the square with no place to go. Falling off of the bottom of a square into an incompatible one results in a quick warp back to the start (or to the position of the last key you picked up). You didn't think you could just skip from here to there to any place you wanted, did you? That's how unlucky teleporters reappear halfway through a wall, y'know. Although I don't think that happened in A Wrinkle in Time... I feel like I would have at least remembered something like that.

Analysis: Let the records show that Continuity is one of the most effortlessly enjoyable puzzle games on the Web to date. It manages to waltz right over all the pitfalls that plague so many an entry in this genre. For example, failure in this game never burns that bad, because you're only ever a hop, skip, and a tile-swap away from right where you were before. Of course, the levels eventually get longer and scarier, but never does it feel like you need to retrace an hour of work because of a single misstep, and the key-checkpoint system is usually generous.

The puzzles here require you to think with a lobe of your brain you may not use too often. It's like an M.C. Escher drawing in two dimensions, requiring you to discard your silly notions of upstairs and downstairs and realize they're just stairs, independent of direction or space or any other of our countless, conditioned reference frames. If you can program your mind to work in such alien modes, then you'll be right at home. Even if you can't, the bulk of levels early on shouldn't be too mentally taxing, and by the time you've arrived at the later labyrinths, your Escher-O-Vision ought to be all warmed up.

It's not just the puzzling where this game shines, though. The visuals are simple, but functionally effective. Anything more complicated than black on another color would have only made the proper square transitions harder to perceive. The music adds a lovely backdrop; there's a soft twinkling of sound for the level manipulation, accompanied by some action-packed techno beats for your up-close platforming. Add to that some ingenious level design and a nifty menu function that lets you skip insurmountable levels, and I think there's a superior candidate here for a potential mobile game. There's something just so clean and elegant about it, and isn't there an almost touch-screen quality to the sliding of the tiles?

Well, I think so. Sure beats ants and string, anyway.

Play Continuity.

I have to admit, I've never before played a game that so candidly displayed my sentiments on the preloader before. And for someone who's had the occasional introverted streak every now and again (such as myself), it won't be the last moment where a thought you've had is displayed on the screen. This is no run-of-the-mill puzzle game. No, this is a thoroughly psychological romp, equal parts replay-themed platformer and character study. This is The Company of Myself, from Eli Piilonen (Spewer) with artwork by Luka Marcetic and music by David Carney.

It all starts with a thought-provoking little monologue, fleshing out the protagonist and his mentality. Shortly afterwards, you're dropped into the game itself, where the controls are familiar to anyone remotely acquainted with the platform genre. Arrow keys get you from place to place, with [Up] for jumping and the [A] key for flipping switches. [P] or [Esc] will pause your game, and [R] will restart the current level, an action you'll get to know quite intimately before you're done. And then there's [Space], which starts out as the button that gets you through the green door at each level's end. However, a couple of challenges in, [Space] becomes a bit more interesting.

All of your actions (right up until you hit [Space]) are being recorded, as though by an invisible video camera. As soon as you reset the clock, the level starts anew, except now there's a phantasmal double of yourself scurrying about, re-enacting your first playthrough move for move. Press [Space] again, and add another one to the mix, this one also moving according to the steps you laid out. Some levels will place a restriction on the number of ghostly doppelgangers you can conjure, and these are the levels where you'll have to see just how adeptly you can work with...well, yourself.

Analysis: The first thing you'll notice is that a lot of this game is in the narrative. Ethereal white words coalesce in the background frequently, portraying the character's self-reflective musings. Much is said on the subjects of loneliness and how people cope, all framed within one man's story. I wasn't a tremendous fan of the ending, which puts things in perspective, but the character had me enticed throughout.

Oh, and the gameplay! We've all seen games in this vibe before (coulda sworn there was even a competition about it...), but this adventure does a great job of coming up with puzzles where you're truly forced to team up with your past incarnations. The funny moments are the ones where your timing wasn't split-second-perfect on your first run, and as your past self mistimes a switch-flip that sends you plummeting to your doom, you'll find yourself becoming quickly frustrated at...yourself? It's an odd sensation, but it's certainly in line with the themes of the game.

In terms of overall game length, it's not particularly long, and none of the levels (with a couple of near end-game toughies) ought to put up too much of a fight against your powerful, puzzle-trained mind. But if you were to get stuck on any level for too long, I'd think that would impede the monologue that reads alongside the entire affair, and that's against what the game designers would have wanted. It's a mighty fine platformer, a well-told story, and a fantastic distraction when you've got some time to enjoy the company of yourself for just a little while.

Play The Company of Myself.

We've all heard the news, seen the depressing documentaries about endangered species being hauled off for one reason or another, but it just breaks your heart to see an alien dragon all netted up by some unscrupulous starcruiser to make a cheap space-buck. And a mommy alien dragon, no less! Thankfully, this alien dragon just happened to be sitting on a precious little alien dragon egg, and Momma Dralien didn't hatch a coward. You're in for a grand adventure, a precarious rescue operation, and all in all, something of A Dralien Day, the newest point-and-click quest from Robin Vencel of PencilKids.

Gameplay takes place across a series of scenes, each infested by dangerous foes, puzzling mechanisms, and other varied points of interest. Any and all clickable hot spots are highlighted with little white circles, drawing your attention to anything you might need to solve the situation at hand. There's also some action-packed minigames linking a couple of the scenes; they're a fun, cheesy little diversion from the puzzles, although you can skip them if you so desire (for a penalty to your final score, of course).

None of the puzzles are really super-challenging, although a link at the top of the page can whisk you to a video walkthrough should you ever become truly stuck. The glowing hot spots are appreciated, but take away a certain element of "puzzliness" from the affair. Instead of scouring the screen for that which might be of some use, the circles merely invite you to find whatever order you're supposed to click them in, and then you're onto the next challenge. This isn't a bad thing; it just means that the game is more casual fare.

The art's as cartoony as ever, and that baby Dralien has got to be one of the darn cutest extraterrestrials I've ever laid eyes on. The game still manages to maintain that PencilKids charm, of biological Rube-Goldberg machines that push an unlikely hero through the toughest odds. And let's be honest here, you can't stand the thought of that poor little guy being separated from his mom. Can you?

Play A Dralien Day.

I don't have the foggiest idea of what the distant, hovercar-laden future holds, but if video games and science fiction have taught me anything, I sure don't want to be a part of it. There's unsavory aliens bent on human annihilation, colonizations of planets not fit for even the hardiest cockroaches to survive, and THEN there's the robots. Robots who question their existential place in the universe, robots who go off and form their own splinter governments of mechanical efficiency, and the good ol' uncomplicated ones who just go completely haywire and start frying people with eye lasers. The Tickler is a robot who falls into one of those three categories, in the latest action arena game from Revzin Ideaworks, and I'll give you a hint: he's really not that big on existentialism.

Following a short cut scene that sets up your homicidal killbot's back story, you're deposited right into the thick of the action. Controls are simple: the Tickler follows your cursor to move around, and clicking the mouse activates his retractable arms. Holding down the mouse button will keep his arms extended, and any enemy ensnared in his claws will be continually, er, "tickled" until they're no more. Destroyed foes yield cash that can be spent on handy Tickler renovations between levels, ranging from your standard-issue damage/armor/speed upgrades to peripheral weapons like projectile buzzsaws, lightning projectors, and of course the eye lasers no good killbot should be caught without.

23 levels of robo-tickling excitement await you, and while most of them don't provide too robust a challenge, there's the occasional bad apple that might elicit more than a couple of replays. Thankfully, the game graciously lets you hang onto whatever money you managed to score up until your demise, so you've got the chance to salvage some upgrades to get you out of your rut. There's also the "Zombie Mash," a survival mode where you see how many waves of the undead your souped-up Tickler can endure.

This is one of those games where you'll probably know in the first 10 seconds of playing whether or not the Tickler is your kind of heartless killing machine. There isn't a ton of depth to the experience, but there's a heaping helping of cartoony zaniness, and the rockin' soundtrack certainly adds an element of "extreme" to the marauding. The controls are easy, the gameplay is straightforward, and the humans look ripe for the robot definition of the word "tickling".

Play The Tickler.

The level starts. You maneuver a little to the left, a little to the right, just to get a bearing on how strong your gas jets are. Perfect. Without so much as batting an eye, you fly off the starting platform and hover through a tunnel coated in remorseless spikes, top and bottom. Weaving between mines in the air that detonate but a hair's breadth from your back, you eventually come face to face with a lightning fence that activates every few seconds. Waiting patiently for the electricity to dissipate, you know full well that a little too much gas or not quite enough will result in you becoming a permanent part of the decor. Is this "Extreme Jumpjet Fighter 4," you might ask? No, this is Hash, the latest arcade-style dodgefest from Alternative Indie Games.

Your character, the titular hash mark, moves around the levels via gas jets that are activated with the [arrow] keys. Either [Esc] or the [P] key will pause your game. Every level is populated by a number of glistening dots, which bolster your score should you collect them. Of course, as the levels progress, some of those dots will be tucked inside tight rings of mines, or in enemy-infested territory, or even within grids of those nasty, aforementioned lightning fences. Whenever you've picked up enough dots or just plain had enough, touching down on the glowing diamond in every level finishes your stay.

Analysis: The game's minimalist graphics work well, especially when coupled with the old-fashioned arcade objectives and the lively music, which sounds like an 8-bit tune being hammered out by the guy who plays "The Entertainer" in Western saloons. There's a frenzied energy that powers the whole game, from the jittery main menu to the ever-shifting background colors. It's constantly urging you to move, to react, to blast right through that next obstacle with a smile on your face. Unfortunately, blasting through that next obstacle isn't always that simple.

It's certainly modeled after arcade games of yore, which means the difficulty level is scaled accordingly. Most of the early levels aren't too tough, but just you wait until Level 18. I promise that after Level 18, though, things get easier again (for a while, anyway). There's a sharp discrepancy in challenge between the player just going for the exit in every level, and the player painstakingly trying to collect every dot. Sometimes, it just plunks the exit down, virtually in front of you, and you can either hop right on through or attempt an agonizing roller-coaster of dexterity trying to get all those dots, nestled comfortably in a jungle-gym of game-restarting spikes. So, it all boils down to how hardcore you are about getting the high scores. It might have been nice to offer some other reward for the earnest player, but if this is the kind of game that really revs your jumpjets, then the visceral satisfaction of the high score is probably all the reward you need.

Play Hash.

If I ever had to live out a game genre in real life, you can bet your bottom, middle, and top dollars simultaneously I wouldn't pick the physics puzzle (or the phuzzle, as it's known in these here parts). I'd get sick of being tossed about like a hyperkinetic skipping stone, and being subjected to all sorts of conditional gravities, and then there would be the constant resetting of time and space to approximately 30 seconds prior every time a single molecule dropped a little too far to the left. Not that I'd be tremendously happy dismantling screwdrivers for keys in a room escape game, but... I suppose beggars can't be choosers. Unfortunately for the bouncing red balls of Springen, the latest phuzzle on the block from Pier-Jean Lizotte, they're going to get every treatment on the list, including a couple new ones completely free of charge.

Every level starts with a number of red balls rotating around a starting ring, your starting point and where the balls return should you reset the level (with the [R] key). The goal is to get every red ball on the black ring, or at least as many as you need to progress to the next level. To do so, you'll need to click on a ball on the starting hoop, and then move your cursor accordingly to account for direction and intensity. Let go of the mouse button to release, and then it's all up to the simulated forces of nature. Until you start finding those items that allow you to click on and re-fire a ball, in midair. Then there's bumpers, and teleporters, and gravity changers, and even remorseless ball-popping spikes. See, now you feel bad for the red balls too.

Springen is not a challenge for the faint of brain; while there's a well-sized chunk of straightforward levels, there's a few dastardly rogues in there that ought to give you a run for your money. There's also a little bit of practice and skill involved, as the farther you have to lob those red globes, the less accurate you become and the more gravity becomes a fickle master. The balls are heavier than they look, and when you add a wealth of bumpers, gravity wells, and other gizmos between you and the ending hoop, some of the puzzles test your luck as opposed to your intellect.

Thankfully, the majority of the puzzles require crafty feats of ball-flinging, and you'll have to learn to use some of those obstacles to your advantage if you hope to make it through all 30 levels of phuzzling goodness. Maybe the red balls actually have a good deal, here in a physics puzzle; you're springing them out of the room for them, and they don't even need to touch a single screwdriver.

Play Springen.

It's funny; I remember being a wee lad with a clunky PC who just installed the Shockwave player on his computer, because the pop-up prompt told me to and shockwaves are generally cool phenomena, and I'd use it to play quaint little time-wasters. Notable among those games were the progenitors of the match-3 family, a lineage that's seen some serious sprouting the past few years. Why, I remember when all the games had you do was match 3 like-mannered objects, and that was all there was to it! None of these bonuses, or power-ups, or other shiny doodads all you kids are so used to nowadays in developers' attempts to distinguish their sample from the pack. And I mean, combo multipliers are one thing, but sorcery? You whippersnappers are a tough crowd to impress. Say hello to Jungle Magic, the newest addition to the match-3 family tree.

The objective is familiar to those acquainted with the genre; click on one piece to select, and then click on an adjacent piece to swap their respective locations. Should the swap result in an unbroken chain of three similarly colored tiles, the pieces will vanish, your score will rise, and new pieces will rain in from the top. The twist on this one comes in the form of a golden talisman, which has been splintered apart into sparkling fragments in every level. You'll have to clear out all the colorful detritus keeping a fragment from reaching the bottom of the play screen in order to collect it; once you've pocketed all of the talisman parts (within the time limit, of course), you're off to the next level, where even more matching action awaits. But that's not the whole story, of course. This isn't "Jungle Sorting", it's Jungle Magic, so it's magic you'll get.

As levels progress, you'll gain access to a host of mystical powers, each one assigned to a different color. By creating two consecutive matches of the same color, you'll trigger a spell, whose effect depends on the pieces' hue. Let's say you make two matches in a row with gray tiles, right? Gray is the color of wind, so somewhere on the board, a whistling bullet of air pressure obliterates a piece directly below a golden fragment. Doesn't sound too chaotic, but remember, once the levels start going, you're going to learn magic for just about EVERY kind of color, and before you know it, pieces will be exploding in squalls of wind and flame, and lightning bolts will scurry through your tiles with the mercy of a storm.

Watching all the spell effects go off is a blast, which is handy, since you'll need to be making clever use of your magic by an early point in the game in order to survive. Since only two consecutive matches of a single color are required to trigger a spell, though, you're never too far away from that bonus time, which can make some of the levels a little on the easy side as long as you keep an eye on those yellows. Another problem is when your magic arcs out of control (every jungle shaman's worst nightmare), and the combo chains start endlessly reproducing. Most of the time, this is okay (and rather spectacular to watch), but occasionally, the self-chaining will step on the toes of a vital match you were about to make. This isn't so frequent as to hinder the fun factor, however, and to be honest, every sorcerer knows that's what they signed up for when leashing their will to the forces of the cosmos. Comes with the territory.

At its core, though, there's a robust match-3, with nice graphics and some nifty mechanics. There's a lot of fun to be had in devising strategies where different spells play off of each other, especially once your different colors start "leveling up." (Green becomes a multi-pronged juggernaut of raw elemental destruction.) There's never been a better, more magical time to become a matcher.

Play Jungle Magic.

Some people believe dreams are memories collected over the day's time, assembled into a sort of psychic collage that defies description. Others believe that they are prophecies, glimpses of fates not yet transpired in a time when our minds are free to sail to such distant shores. We can attempt to understand them with REM and our so-called science, but when it comes right down to it, the vast majority of us have absolutely no idea what dreams are. We submit to them come bedtime, we perform on their strange stage, and then we awaken in the morning, unmarked but not always unscathed. Sometimes the process is not quite as simple, however, and many times has a dreamer lost sight of the path to morning. What becomes of these people, and where do they wander? This is the realm of the Waker, the star of Poof Games' latest concoction.

You control a mystical, catlike quadruped whose sole purpose is to repair the roads by which drifting dreamers can return to the world of day. This requires collecting wisps, sprinkled across a series of elaborate dreamscapes. You'll use the arrow keys to traverse these worlds, including [up] (or [space]) for all your jumping needs. [D] is an all-purpose interaction key, perfect for picking up or dropping objects as well as flipping switches. [S] prompts your Waker to sprint at breakneck speed, which becomes necessary to solve some of the later puzzles. And the puzzles are plentiful.

Nestled in the levels are enchanted orbs, which will conjure a platform for however long you keep the orb in your paws. Now, what shape that platform takes depends on variables keyed to the specific kind of orb. For example, one brand of globe might alter the platform's slope based on how fast you're running at the time, while another could change with your position within the level itself. Then there's black spheres of nightmare that can warp you back to the start with a touch, self-made prisons of summoned platforms...no one said the life of a Waker was easy.

Analysis: Waker is a project born from GAMBIT, Singapore-MIT's game design lab, and the multidisciplinary input shows. The art and animation invoke the phantasmal in such a way that it's not hard to believe that this idea could have been hauled from the same place dreams come from. Little touches breathe life into the Waker and the world, like the blinking of one eye at a time should you let the creature sit still for a few moments. The music is softly whimsical, the same way a child's dream should be.

While the writing sets up the game quite marvelously, what with the Wakers and the Dreamtime and associated fantasies, the story starts to fade as the game progresses, being delivered to the player in short injections between one world and the next. It's a tad disappointing to have the developers weave all this vibrant lore about what happens when the lights go out, only to have it squeezed into the cracks. It would have been nicer to see the story dovetail with the gameplay more smoothly, but there's still a lot more creativity at work here than your average puzzle game.

The platforming can be as tidy or as troublesome as you'd like; it really boils down to the way you sculpt it. If you can manage to get all your orb-empowered platforms to only have steps at right angles and swerve perfectly through every obstacle, than the platforming ought to be a walk in the park, with dreams for trees. More often than not, however, your platforms will not be works of aesthetic splendor. They'll probably be bumpy, or spiky, or look like a dying man's ECG. And it's in these cases where you run afoul of some wonky physics; you might not be able to jump as high as usual, or perhaps even not at all. Usually, these situations involve such gnarled platforms that you can understand why you can't scurry up that 88-degree slope, but just remember that the cleaner your platforms, the better.

The challenges are all puzzles in the purest sense of the word: they encourage experimentation on the player's part, they may require some unorthodox thinking, and there will be more than one instance of you face-palming as an elusive solution suddenly dawns on you. While the game might be short for those who attack it head-on, it's certainly a trip worth taking, and the dazzling visuals coupled with the imaginative tale of the Wakers marks this game as one of the most innovative puzzlers to date. Now don't let me keep you, for there's already a child lost in the slumber, hoping for someone, anyone to show them the way home.

Well? The Waker is waiting.

Play Waker.