Are you a "fixer"? Get your kicks from putting gears into motion? Then I know a village that's hiring: just use your scrutiny and a pinch of physics-based ingenuity to make the windless mills function again. Although short and nothing to earn an engineering degree on, there's plenty of appeal in this physics puzzle game from a well-designed interface to serenely appealing graphics, you can get your inner Don Quixote on and be the savior of an entire village. Who could pass on that?

You know what really grinds my gears? Not being able to get that golden gear out from underneath that mess of beams and curves. In Clockwork, you can slide and shuffle your cares away in a clever puzzler where it takes perfect synchronization to free the gear from its elaborate entrapment.

Gear puzzles are popular fodder for games these days. If gears aren't the main feature, as in David Durham's Gear Puzzle, then they're a vital component of a switch box or piece of alien machinery in an adventure game. At first glance, Connect It seems like more of the same, but after exploring deeper, this seemingly simple gear puzzler reveals an entertaining and complex depth.

Not quite a pipe puzzle and not quite a gear puzzle, Grayscale is a melding of the two genres into something both unique to play and easy on the eyes. The difficulty ramps up quite nicely and is enough to hold interest through the levels as you struggle to produce the black and white fireworks that denote success. Quite a lot of brain twisting, turning, and teasing bundled up into a beautiful little bow.

Gear Puzzle is a simple puzzle game featured in our recent game design competition. As the game begins, a small blue character with big puppy-dog eyes catches sight of a pink character locked in a cage. The cage is chained to a gear suspended from the top of the screen. Pegs line the wall and various sized gears are scattered around. Helpless but heroic, the blue guy does the only thing he can to help: jumps on the gear across the room and starts spinning it. Your job is to arrange gears on the pegs to transfer the motion across the room to lower the cage.