Once upon a time, an exceptional game designer decided to put his hands to making a 'cool' game. It worked. The result was Excitebike, a fast-paced and challenging motorbike racing game. Released this year is the strikingly similar debut game from Turborilla, the aptly titled Mad Skills Motocross. While there are obvious differences between the latter and former games, the general idea of "move right using a motorbike while making jumps and going fast" is here, and that's what we like to see.

We see clones of classic casual games everywhere—games with blocks that fall and lines that clear. But the ones that really shine through are those that build on a classic formula and make something new out of it. Chain Factor is one of the those games. While the game may seem intimidating at first, with its grid of all sorts of numbers and the occasional boulder, it is actually deceptively simple.

The third installment in the block-manipulating, anagram-solving, funny-bone-tickling series, the first installment of which was voted one of the Best Games of 2008 by JIG. After nearly two sad blockless years, Marty Sears is back with all the fiendish brain-teasing action and absurd animations fans have come to expect. And if you're new to BWLO, you'll find this even more of a treat... and even more of a punishment. A punishing treat? Anyway, yay!

For some reason, everyone loves collecting things that are smaller than they are. We're not so much interesting in gathering buildings as we are looking at them, but if buildings were pint-sized, you can bet they'd fill our pockets like lint-covered jellybeans. Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds plays on this compulsion and puts you in control of a blob of gray goo that can eat anything smaller than it is. As you can guess, this is a dangerous thing to let loose on the Earth, but give it a time machine and all of the past and future could be in quite a pickle.

A soothing sound toy with which to bathe the aural senses, Pianolina is a beautifully designed and gorgeously sounding Flash application created to introduce you to the sounds of the Grotrian piano. Choose between several different compositions and see how the notes react to gravity as they bounce around the display.

Flashxed manages to breathe a little life into the familiar block-matching puzzle theme with a new mechanic: block dragging. You're presented with a set of bricks with colored orbs sparkling inside. Drag blocks left or right one at a time, and if two or more blocks of the same color touch, they smash and crumble away. It's extraordinarily perplexing at times, but that challenge is what makes it so fun.

Briquid is a physics puzzle game from Gamious that quite neatly combines brick removal, brick creation, and flowing liquids. With a few simple taps it's your job to shift all of the water on the screen to the designated zones, all while staying under your movement limit and without wasting a drop of the precious stuff. It's a bit of an extreme brain bender at times, but it's just accessible enough to work!

Anyone familiar with Ferry Halim's Orisinal collection of games will immediately recognize his characteristic style of art in the image to the right. Those who are not yet familiar are in for a treat: These playful pups are the main characters in his latest Flash game.

As a slightly dimwitted hero, you'll proceed down from the top floor of the eponymous tower in an attempt to escape... but chances are you'll meet your death a fair number of times along the way. Make sure you bring your sword and shield. Or fez and rapier. Or skull and mace. Or... you know what, we'll let you decide.

Hotel 626 is an amazingly innovative, beautifully-produced nightmare of a game. After "checking in" (giving the website your name, email and creating a password), you are immediately whisked away into the opening movie: your awakening, in the middle of the night, in your room at this hellish hotel.

Nearly a year after the first installment was released, the Gretel and Hansel trilogy continues in this twisted, dark and slightly comedic take on the classic fairytale from Mako Pudding. Separated from her brother in the forest, can Gretel outwit all manner of strange and scary fables to be reunited with Hansel? Of course she can, with your help! After all, girls rule, and boys drool... in Hansel's case, at least, that's literal, so you might want to get a move on.

This is your chance to be the spook, and we don't mean the sort that stare at goats. This simply vibrant and unusual action puzzler by the Super Flash Bros puts you in the role of a ghost who seeks to haunt a house in peace and quiet, but your house has been overrun by a bunch of noisy party guests and it's up to you to scare the living daylights out of all thirty, yes thirty, of them.

Get ready to smackdown your opponent in the one or two player game Wrestle Jump! Control a Mexican wrestler with the single goal of pounding the other guy's head to the ground. Kick your leg against the arena floor to throw your opponent wildly around. Whoever gets the most smackdowns wins!

Strike Force Heroes, by Sky9 Games, is a frenetic action arena shooter that proves that the best way to unravel a shadowy conspiracy is blasting everything in sight. Shares a developer with Raze 2, and many similarities with that game. Still, Strike Force Heroes offers a lot of variety and customization, and even if online multiplayer is a sad omission, pwning CPU newbs has never been so satisfying.

Calling all tiny knights! The tiny princess has been captured by the tiny wizard and is being held in his tiny castle! We need someone to go on an itty-bitty platforming adventure to rescue her while avoiding monsters, traps, and a frequently changing environment. Think you've got what it takes? All of you who aren't knee-high on a grasshopper need not apply.

Welcome to The Water Well by no1game.net, a quiet room escape game that won't solve all your problems, but is certainly an oasis of calm in an otherwise frantic week.

This week, we present the exclusive debut of a super-duper, extra-special room escape game, one we can guarantee that absolutely no other website has yet featured. Don't you feel special? To all the JIG faithful, we present to you the world premiere of.... Casual Gameplay Escape!

Help a little robot get his life together in this melancholic Metroidvania platformer from Tony (Antony Lavelle) of Armor Games. Explore an ominous facility under the purview of your disappointed computer mother, gathering upgrades and fighting fellow robots. Worth the initial weirdness for a quiet gem of an experience with a surprising amount of depth in its simple design.

Aether is a gloriously imaginative and atmospheric puzzle adventure game in which you swing through the stars to reach several different planets, each with a unique puzzle to solve. The designers have made a truly compelling experience, and it's a fantastic artistic endeavor. You can also just spend some time flying through space or the clouds, the music and movement are so relaxing.

They pushed you down, then kicked you while you were there and stole your lunch money! Stupid Forces of Goodness! Can't tolerate a little badness at all, can they? Well now it's your turn to make them pay (and then some) in Cellar Door Games' quirky, addictive strategy title that puts you on the other side of things in a typical tower defense game.

Even if you don't speak Russian you are still probably familiar with matryoshkas, also known as nesting dolls. And just like the dolls this escape game unfolds in layers, each one revealing a lovely little surprise. Despite the fact that it is called a "mini-escape" Matryoshka contains all the bells and whistles expected in a well-designed escape game: easy inventory control, great puzzles, intuitive navigation, and even a save feature. Come and give Matryoshka a try and, even if you're a macho guy, discover the joy of playing with dolls (and escaping).

The McDonald's Videogame is the newest Flash creation of Molleindustria, an Italian design team dedicated to the discussion of the social and political implications of video games. Overall the game is an entertaining distraction that is definitely worth your time for the satire and laughs or if you enjoy a challenge.

LightSpeeder is a modern day update of a classic light cycle survival racing game. This Unity title features impressive visuals, dynamic cameras, and the ability to jump over light walls as you face against three AI opponents. You can also play against a friend simultaneously in split-screen.

In Submachine 4, there was a note mentioning thirty-two chambers filled with sand. Somehow, you've gotten teleported into this subterranean world. Do you need to escape? Or is there some higher purpose that's summoned you here? In addition to the obvious sand, Submachine: 32 Chambers evokes the exploration mood associated with sandbox games. There's no obvious goal at first; you need to figure that out yourself. Submachine: 32 Chambers was fully worthy of its prizes, and you won't want to miss it.

Music Bounce is a bit like Breakout, but with an unlikely musical twist. Each level presents you with a different layout of colored bricks. Your job is to wipe them all out by striking them with ammunition from an array of gates on the left side of the screen. And if everything is running properly, Music Bounce can be magical.

If you've not experienced Hashi before, Classic Hashi Light is ideal for getting familiar with the format. The goal of a hashi puzzle is to connect all of the numbered islands using a series of bridges so that every island is connected to each other in one system. Since this is Volume 1 in a periodically-released series, the difficulty might be a bit low for the experienced Hashi-head, but it's a great introduction to the puzzle for newcomers.

Trapped in a cave. Laser things shooting at you. Buttons everywhere. Spikes even more everywhere. It's a normal day for our featureless friend in Focus, a puzzle platform game originally by Karoshi author Jesse Venbrux. Ported to the browser world by Joseph Ivie, Focus features over 50 levels of extra difficult action, sticking you in enclosed rooms with all manner of dangers and challenging you to use your platforming skills to make it out alive.

Exploit is a tile-based puzzle game with a computer hacking theme from Gregory Weir, the creator of The Majesty of Colors and Bars of Black and White. Plot out your moves carefully and pay special attention to incoming emails, and not only will you help the oppressed people of Locha, but you might, just might, prevent a terrorist attack here on our own soil. Good luck, hacker, you're going to need it!

Gigolo Assassin is a new point-and-click adventure from Mediatonic and created for Adult Swim. In this first installment of a three part series, you must guide your gigolo (I named mine Bruce Digelow) through an isolated tropical island in order to put a stop to the sinister goings on of one Alana Lamia. In so doing you will meet an assortment of unique (and decidedly non-unique) characters as well as solve item based puzzles much along the same vein as the old Sierra and Lucas Arts point-and-click adventures.

You Are Lucky! is a gorgeous little game, created by Shuichi Oshida, that is a cross between a point-and-click game and one from the Grow series. The aim is to uncover all ten of the characters (who look a bit like WarBears with pastel coloured turds on their heads). Unlike Grow, you don't have a list of items to check off - simply click things and see what happens.

An odd and addictive little game of violence against stick figures intent on invading your castle. From what I can glean, the gameplay has some depth by allowing you to purchase additional units and upgrades between levels.

Detective Grimoire is a point-and-click carnival murder mystery in which you play the title character, a hatless (but not hapless) crime-solver assigned to track down the murderer of Hugh Everton, ineffective caretaker of the carnival funhouse. It contains a higher-than-average level of cheese, but what good cheesy mystery doesn't?

With Zuma's Revenge Popcap has hit a homerun. As with the original, you can easily waste hours and hours playing this game with no end in sight. Humorous, beautiful, addictive, Zuma's revenge includes everything a casual gamer could desire, with 50% more boss fights!

After an extensive beta period where the game moved from a download to a browser-based Unity3D experience, the 3D platform adventure game Atmosphir is open and ready for everyone! Fueled by user-created content, Atmosphir allows anyone to craft custom levels using a simple, thorough, and surprisingly fun editor.

Planetarium is a story-puzzle in twelve weekly installments, into which is woven a fantastical fable and many marvelous puzzles. Follow the tale of the Mathemagician and a strange girl with no memory but perfect foresight, as they search for the source of a mysterious love letter sent from the future. Don't be surprised if this brilliant, unique and beautiful game soon becomes one of your favorites.

Isle of Tune is a fairly simple webtoy, with a mere six elements that you can control to create a variety of sounds. There's just enough tools available to let you create some rather intricate loops. The pre-made loops are a great way to get an island started, and the simple sharing system is good for spreading your island creations with everyone.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is an innovative and award-winning download game for both Mac and Windows that defies classification. It's a unique genre-bending game that includes puzzle and RPG elements, as well as a variety of mini-games. All these disparate elements synthesize remarkably well, and the gameplay quickly becomes intuitive.

Can you torque the talk? In this unusual Flash adventure game your spacecraft crash lands on an alien planet, and to escape you must observe the culture and learn a new language to communicate with the inhabitants of this alien world. Remarkable in its originality and design, as well as its gameplay.

Earning an honorable mention in our 2nd Flash game competition is Rings and Sticks, a captivating and original puzzle game from designer Komix and created expressly for the competition. More so than any other entry in the contest, Rings and Sticks took the Grow theme and made it a fundamental element of the gameplay.

Laxius Force is your latest old-school fix. Inspired by classic 16-bit role playing games, Laxius Force boasts 17 playable characters, multiple storylines that gradually weave together an intriguing plot, and original artwork and music. All while battling countless foes, earning experience, and equipping your party with powerful weapons and armor.

This simple and elegant Flash game looks like a work of art: minimal design paired with maximum gameplay. While not an original concept, Gridlock features classic sliding-block puzzle gameplay that will surely exercise your brain. A well-executed game in the genre, and a very beautiful game to behold.

From Aztec, creator of Escape from Island and Jinja (The Shrine), comes yet another superbly crafted point-and-click adventure game, Escape from Octlien. The sci-fi themed title drops you on a spaceship with very little information on what you're supposed to do. Explore the environment, collect items, and try and make your way through this lengthy and challenging game.

What happens when you give Mario a portal gun? A mish-mash of two extraordinarily recognizable games — Super Mario Bros. and Portal — with a whole lot of extras. Mari0 puts you in control of our favorite pixellated plumber as he goes on his famous adventure from the mid-1980s, only this time, he's got the power of portals on his side!

Areas is a simple-looking but ultimately complex, addictive and atmospheric shooter by Ridulous. There is no text to be had in the menus, only icons, which are easy enough to figure out. And you don't click on them, or anything, throughout the game. If you want to interact with something, mouse over it and be patient, and it will unfold for itself.

Voted Best of 2005 by the visitors of Jayisgames, Hapland 2 is less a continuation of the original as it is the same game with all-new puzzles: The objective is once again to open the stone portal and unleash the power within. And while that doesn't exactly give any clue as to what to do, it does at least provide a goal to work towards. Thanks to its popularity, there is now a Hapland 3!

We all know Minecraft by now, the massively cool 3D sandbox creativity game that lets you explore, craft, and build anything you like. Then there's Terraria, a game that took the same formula and flattened it into a 2D sidescrolling game, adding combat and some other nice extras in the process. Both titles have spawned similar games on numerous platforms, but so far the mobile realm hasn't been a fertile ground for the sandbox genre. Until Junk Jack came along. This 2D pixel-gorgeous game takes the all-too-familiar crafting, digging, and exploration formula to your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, bringing with it an entire world of possibilities.

If you always liked playing Pictionary as a board game with friends, now you can doodle away mobile style with Draw Something. A game very similar to Charadium or XSketch, OMGPOP brings players a socially addicting Pictionary-style game to both iOS and Android platforms. The game has even become so popular that it could possibly spawn a TV show!

Happy peasants harvesting grass. Peaceful people admiring the clouds. Then the bad guys come along and start sieging and such. You don't need much of a story when it comes to physics-based chain reaction games, but in the case of Siege Hero, from the creator of Sieger, you definitely need to know you're the one fighting on the side of good! This highly-polished iOS game features gameplay similar to Castle Crashers, Angry Birds, and even Implode!, although the sum of its well-made parts adds up to something much more intriguing.

The 2010s are shaping up to be the decade of the Internet renegade, yet for those of us without the technical savvy necessary to participate in virtually sticking it to the man, BoxCat LLC offers us a tempting and significantly more legal alternative with Nameless: The Hackers, a mobile RPG with a lot of virtual bite.

When your car veers off the road one night following a bizarre episode, you have no choice but to seek help at the comfortingly named Drowned Dead Hotel despite the frantic warnings of one of the young women living there. It quickly becomes apparent that you're going to need more than a mechanic to get out, and both the crumbling hotel and nearby town hold more than their share of unpleasant little secrets. Codeminion's latest hidden-object adventure allows you to switch to match-3 on the fly if you don't like item searching, and also provides some genuinely creepy atmosphere to make one very engrossing game.

As one of six mythical heroes, each with their own set of goals, sail off in search of treasure and your place in history in ancient Greece. Discover legendary cities, meet interesting people . . . and pound the snot out of them for your own financial gain. It's a thankless job, being a hero.

Farm Frenzy weds an arcade title with a resource management sim for a game that's as much thought and planning as it is fast mouse clicking. Gameplay revolves around planting grass to feed animals which in turn drop goods for you to use. These goods can either be sold for cash to improve your farm or turned into higher-value products to rake in even more gold. As you progress through the game's 45 stages you can buy more animals, get new buildings and upgrade existing structures, all while keeping a lookout for bears that drop from the sky!

Sam and Max cap off the final episode of their new season of adventure games with The City That Dares Not Sleep.

For those who prefer a single-player experience, or at least one to practice with to hone one's skills in preparation for a heads-up match against another human opponent, and if a little Japanese text won't scare you off, then give Taro Ito's GameDesign Flash implementation of Hanafuda a try.

Aunts and Butlers is an enjoyable (and humorous) interactive fiction game by Robin Johnson. Playable in any Javascript-enabled web browser, you play the role of the Honourable Ampersand Fodge on a quest to... well... not die poor. Good thing rich, old and unmarried Aunt Cedilla is stopping by for tea!

Winner of the Intel Indies film contest last week, The Wand is an animated short film by artist Nick Worthey and backed by Atom Films. Ever wonder what you would do if you found a wand that granted an unlimited number of wishes? That is just what happens to the central character in this Flash movie that is both humorous and thought provoking.

Not a game per se, but definitely fun to play with. Infinite Wheel is a series of Flash movies by Jim Johnstone that borrows samples from various 'Dub' artists and presents them in a virtual playground in which you click, drag, and mouse-over the unique and compelling interactive controls to create your own dub music mixes.

Back in 2005, Jay is Games introduced us to one of the creepiest, scariest, most popular point-and-click experiences the Web had ever seen, The House, which is still massively popular years later. It's been 5 years, and now Sinthai Boonmaitree has finally created a sequel, The House 2. Dare you enter the mind of this talented Thai flash designer? Oh, heck yeah!

How well do your hands work together? In FireBoy and WaterGirl: The Forest Temple, you're either your own best friend or worst enemy as you simultaneously control two characters throughout fast-paced levels of puzzle-y, platform-y goodness.

Voted Best of 2005 by the visitors of Jayisgames, the gameplay here is similar to the previous games in the series, Grow and Grow RPG. As with the others, the order in which you click the items determines the outcome of the game. Simple and delightful, these games are among the crown jewels of the Web. By Eyezmaze.

These fun, quirky little point-and-click diversions star a large-headed, unusually plucky baby who must traverse land, sea and even across the street to rescue his beloved bamba snacks from the clutches of an evil squirrel (and then, when things take a turn for the weird, from a giant mosquito). So...adorable...excuse me while I go suck on a lemon to balance the sweetness.

Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl who couldn't stay apart no matter how often it seemed like the world and their own emotions were trying to make that happen. A puzzle platformer with a beautiful sense of style and a sweet, nostalgic look at relationships, Mattia Traverso's game is short but well made and surprisingly warm and fuzzy. D'awwww.

Connor Ullmann fires up the Wayback Machine for those gorgeous little retro action adventure inspired by classic 2D games like Zelda. As a little boy who was apparently born from a breath of wind, your quest for self-discovery and the wishes of your maker will take you across a huge world teeming with enemies, secrets, treasure, puzzles, and more. A beautiful little gem with classic gameplay and a satisfying adventure that is well worth checking out even if you weren't born when games like this were in their heyday.

When you look at Not to Scale, you may be thinking, "A tile swapping puzzle that looks like the final project for someone's Flash Programming 101 course? What could possibly be worth my time here?" And you'd end up missing a really enjoyable experience. By using slots for the tiles of varying sizes, and carefully selected photographs, the game gives you a unique spatial sense twisting puzzle challenge.

Looking for a little Halloween every day? Then point-and-click through the latest Zeebarf/Steve Castro gore-fest, The Visitor Returns, another installment of the saga of the disturbing pink grub and his appetite for bloody, cartoonish mayhem.

Nations need to brace themselves for a complete loss of productivity as folks all over the world once again become immersed in the major time-suckage that is a bloons tower defense game. Enough talk, time to play Bloons Tower Defense 5!

Grow ver.2 is completely different than what Grow ver.3 turned out to be, and yet the basic premise is the same as it is for all of the Grow games: Just click on the various items, one-by-one, and try to make them all reach their maximum level. Hint: order matters.

Grow RPG takes the classic formula that made the original so compelling to play, and adds additional RPG-like elements, such as enemy combat, a shop to buy health and weapons, and even a dungeon with hidden treasure. Voted Best of 2005 by the visitors of Jayisgames.

In the Dog House is a cute sliding puzzle game that tasks you with sliding rooms around a grid to create a path from dog to dogfood in the kitchen. To encourage the pup to move, simply grab the bone and drop it somewhere in the house. You'll also have to contend with mechanical contraptions such as elevators and security gates, not to mention the tempting distractions of a cat!

Bart Bonte is back with another sugary sweet installment in his popular particle physics puzzle. While adhering to the same basic concept and gameplay mechanics of the prior two Sugar, Sugar games, this sequel delivers 30 more clever levels of imaginative obstacles in a simple block design plus jazzy tunes.

Evolution has you wandering a rocky underground base filled with mysteries and puzzles, your only company an egg-headed scientist who really likes bananas and seems to have lost his pet cat. As is the 58 Works custom, you'll pick up and use various items that come in handy here and there, and more uniquely acquire pieces of a rather cool bodysuit that gives you all sorts of new abilities. Everything that made Solitude great (an interesting environment, totally logical puzzles, simple but appropriate graphics and sound) is back in Evolution, and the new content (intermittent short cutscenes, a somewhat more artificial setting) is nothing to sneeze at either.

Escape from the Big Windows Room is definitely a great break for the mid-week, a fun pick-me-up to get you out of the doldrums. And perhaps even dream of maybe someday being able to afford to live in such a fantastic space. Hey, even in this economy, a person can dream.

Dys4ia is a retro arcade-y piece of interactive art by transsexual author Anna Anthropy about her six-month experience with hormonal therapy. Raw and emotional, but surprisingly humorous, for good or for bad, this is the kind of game that will get people thinking and talking.

It's that most special time of year again. Time to get on your softest, most comfortable pajamas, and make a mug of peppermint hot chocolate. A crackling fire would be nice, accompanied by Bing Crosby crooning about white Christmases and silver bells...as you sit down, with a sigh of contentment, to play Neutral's newest holiday room escape game. Ah, that most special time of year, indeed.

We all love metroidvanias! But would we still love them if, instead of controlling a scifi bounty hunter, or a badass vampire slayer, we played as the alphabet? Answer: Yes! And ASCIIvania, an exploration platformer by Gharding3, is the proof! ASCIIvania is clearer documentation, a map screen and a mute button away from excellence, but its still a fun time.

After successfully defeating the ginormous Gi8000 in the first mission, Bowja the Ninja is back again and this time it's Bigman's Compound that is the target of ninja stealth and fortitude. Help Bowja defeat Bigman and save innocent people before it's too late in this charming point-and-click adventure.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... OW! Ew... is that a spleen? The fifth chapter of the puzzle-platforming Karoshi series is here, and it's one of the best of the bunch. This edition comes with a flying, indestructible, Super Saiyan alter-ego, a dubious power when the goal of the game is to kill yourself.

Geez, you win a few races and you think you can take on the world! robotJAM and longanimals have gone mad with power and are using their new theme park, Ninja World, to train deadly ninja assassins... your former competitors, in fact! Set out to stop them the only way you know how (namely, through stunts, minigames, and sweet, sweet air time) in this wonderfully silly racing game packed with secrets and unlockables.

Welcome to the strange and somewhat twisted world of Tesshi-e, where the news of a friend opening a new restaurant means not only free food but a restaurant that is specifically set up as a room escape game as well. Escape from the Brick Room is a rather unimaginative title for a quite imaginative and tasty escaping experience. With gorgeous graphics, fun puzzles, and the usual twisted logic Escape from the Brick Room is a mid-week favorite for both escaping and a lovely snack, even if it is virtual. Time to visit your friend's new eatery and enjoy an escape from the everyday.

Brightly colored shapes and arrows. Classical music. Devious programming puzzles. They're all key ingredients in Jahooma's LogicBox, a rather apt name for a game involving lots of boxes and logic and made by a developer named Jahooma. Like SpaceChem and Robot Unlock before it, Jahooma's LogicBox is a game for programmers, and a good one at that. At 18 levels including 4 challenge levels, LogicBox is a little short, but Jahooma promises more to come.

Sarah finds herself trapped somewhere, and she'll need to make use of platforming, puzzle solving, and one very special ability if she wants to escape. Currently only available as a ten level preview, this beautifully smooth and easy to play game that showcases the capabilities of Unity is definitely worth your time to check out.

The clans of the Norse-themed world of Nitrome's popular Ice Breaker series are gathering, but they need your help to release their Viking warriors from their icy, impossible, Goldbergian prisons! Ice Breaker: The Gathering provides short but succulent tidbits of new Ice Breaker levels for fans of the series.

Mr. Y is back with more room escaping goodness in Tesshi-e's 75th escaping effort, Escape from Mr. Y's Room 3. It features all that is good about Tesshi-e room escape design from the beautiful backgrounds to the easy-to-handle inventory. Welcome to Tesshi-e's world where random friends and strangers spend days creating puzzle-filled rooms for you to solve your way out of.

It's rough getting thrown in the Pit. Mainly because everyone there has the Plague, and nobody ever comes out... at least, not until you. Instead of dying, you, a mild castle librarian, unlock a hidden power within yourself that lets you and your friends battle monsters on another plane... and grants you the chance to save the world. A fantastic and engaging indie game from Level Up Labs that blends strategy, tower defense, fantasy, comedy, and even RPG elements for one wildly addictive game.

Here's a deceptively simple point-and-click puzzle game from Emiel de Graaf in which you determine just how to lay out a series of stepping stones to reach the goal. Each stone has a limited number of spaces in which it will move; select the stone and choose the direction you want it to go, using strategy to determine just how to connect pathways and successfully complete the sixteen levels. It's both easy and thoughtful, the perfect way to chill while still steppin' up those brain cells.

The full version of Auditorium is out! The purchase price gets you over 70 levels divided between 15 acts. It's five times as long as the demo was, and features much more particle-manipulating, puzzle-driven gameplay. No saving the universe, no destroying some ancient heart of evil, just a chance to listen to some good classical music and watch a light show.

Broken Picture Telephone is a participatory writing/drawing game based on the old favorite playground game Telephone, that's chock full of hilarious random divergences and oozes fun like bacon oozes grease!

There's very little to complain about with Escape Hotel 4: the puzzles are logical and flow, the navigation is pretty intuitive (except in some hidden spaces), the translations are excellent, and the pixel hunting is at a minimum. This is Tesshi-e room escaping at its best!

Ah, the rural life. Nothing but vast expanses of farmland, the occasional sounds of the barnyard animals, and life-shortening, back-breaking manual labor. But Funny Farm, by Igor Naverniouk, is distinctly different than the farmer lifestyle. This word association game starts on the farm, but quickly branches out into greener pastures.

Improbable Island is a browser-based multiplayer RPG, consisting almost entirely of text. Almost all of it quite funny. It's jam-packed with references to everything from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: to "Sesame Street" to its own insanity. Even if you don't find it outright funny, you will still get a smile from the sheer craziness of it all. This is Improbable Island, where running into forgotten food from your refrigerator is a fairly mundane battle.

Gemini Lost is a casual village simulation that works to bridge the gap between titles like Virtual Villagers and Sprouts Adventure. During an eclipse, a group of people stumble onto an ancient relic with twelve zodiac symbols on its face. Upon touching one of the tiles, they were transported to a strange new world. Now, the twelve symbols are scattered throughout the land, and it's your job to manage the small tribe so they can assemble the pieces and return home!

Wink: The Game is a graphical adventure in which the emphasis is on stealth over brute force. Wink is not exactly a tough guy: his most useful skill is the ability to vanish into the shadows and, whenever one of the hooded, glowy-eyed baddies passes by, creep up from behind and knock the enemy out.

Upon first beginning PonPon House 2, you may find yourself with a strange sense of déjà vu—those rounded, almost huggable graphics, those cutely surreal furnishings, they just seem so familiar. The whole experience is gentle and dreamy, without any sense of urgency or danger.

XSketch is a multiplayer Pictionary-style game with an interesting twist on gameplay and scoring. Players can jump right into any game already in progress and begin to have fun immediately. Points are earned by drawing and guessing successfully, and monthly competition leader boards give the game a real competitive feel.

This simple and strangely compelling toy was just released onto Web featuring a primitive drawing interface with which to create a track for a little character to slide upon. Save and load tracks and even try to attain objectives to increase the enjoyment from this creative little sandbox webtoy.

Yes, it's true--the twelfth and final episode of 10 Gnomes is here. Let's bid a fond farewell to our timid multitude of miniature friends. The next time you look out at the world and fail to see any magic there, just imagine a gnome hiding around every corner. Then imagine you have only ten minutes to find them all.

la Pâte à Son is an amazing sound toy created in France. This original musical piece and compositional tool was conceived to encourage musical experimentation, and its achievements surpass its goal. Not only is this toy fun to play and experiment with, it is also capable of creating some very beautiful music.

The problem with jigsaw puzzles is that they engage two conflicting parts of my brain: my hatred of disorder, and my utter lack of desire to do anything about it. You open the box and there they are, laughing at you, hundreds (thousands, maybe?) of oddly-shaped bits of cardboard. Some of them are even upside-down! White Jigsaw, by gamedesign, solves a lot of those problems: there's no picture, the pieces can't be rotated or flipped over, and it starts out small.

Trapped is a series of 5 adventure puzzle, maze games that start with a minute long "training level" and progresses to 30 minute long (if you play it ten times and memorize the maze) high quality casual gameplay experiences. You are a lonely little arrow, trapped, as the title suggests, in a maze full of simply-shaped enemies set on keeping you there for eternity. Escape if you can.

Another great word game from East of the Web, this one combines the word finding frenzy of Boggle with the scrambled word anagrams of Jumble. 8 Letters in Search of a Word is a race against the clock to score enough points to move on to the next level. Points are awarded by finding words within an 8-letter anagram, established at the beginning of each level.