With nothing onscreen but a few blocky characters and a short poem, Today I Die carves a slice out of an existential nightmare and serves it to you raw. You could classify it as an adventure game or a puzzle game, but it doesn't feel like it should be pigeon-holed with anything. The solutions are so well-integrated, applied with such holistic grace. You won't even realize how many puzzle pieces are displaced until you see how they fit together.

When your spaceship crash-lands onto an unknown desert planet, you regain consciousness to find yourself one of the only survivors. Red Herring Games presents an incredibly polished point-and-click adventure game that has to be seen to be believed.

Prince Peep is the last of the Whistle Knights, who have guarded the legendary Arrow of Time for generations against all invaders. Help Peep keep the Arrow safe in the new defense title from Super Flash Bros: The Arrow of Time.

In Crush the Castle, you control a trebuchet and fling rocks at a castle. Get off a good shot, and you get to watch it fly gracefully towards the castle, smash into a wall, and cause untold destruction, killing all of the inhabitants and turning the entire thing into a massive pile of rubble! Mwa-ha-ha!

Put Paper Mario and Tim Burton in a blender and you get Paper Moon, a smooth, sophisticated example of how to integrate design and mechanics into a masterful casual game. It's a platformer with a twist, and with enough style and depth to keep you coming back for more.

Naming your pet can be a difficult decision. Do you go with something cute like Fuzzy, Furface, or Mittens? Or maybe something average and unassuming like Cat or Dog? Just yesterday I met someone with a pet rabbit called Tundra, which I immediately declared to be the most awesome rabbit name ever.

Playing equal parts as a maze, a hide-and-seek game and a guessing game, the idea of Neon Maze is to run around a glowing labyrinth in your little blur-pod, changing colours to open up new areas, while attempting to find the exit platform. The graphical presentation and surprisingly intricate level design make this one a winner.

The Great War of Prefectures plays like a cross between Risk and an RTS, with Japan's prefectures (analogous to other countries' states or provinces) serving as the territories you fight over. Despites some interface flaws, this game has that elusive quality that will bring you back for more even after you thought you'd had enough.

Quest in the Dark is an exceptionally cute and surprisingly engaging point-and-click adventure. Navigate through the haunted mansion, collecting items and solving puzzles as you go. Beware the various ghosts and skeletons that stand in your path (or don't. They aren't that bad, as it turns out), and above all else, don't forget to find the magic potion that will set you free!

Finally we find out why we have been trapped in so many different rooms in the Great Escape series by Mateusz Skutnik and the Pastel Games crew. Apparently there have been ghosts at every turn, slamming doors and locking us in various areas of the house, and now it's up to you do deal with those ghosts, once and for all. The Great House Escape takes the locale from each of the six previous installments, plus hallways connecting them all, and turns them into one big final "great escape" game.

Are you feeling EVIL? As a demon, you must use your point-and-click skills to find a reincarnated soul and return him to Hell. Your demonic powers include levitation and the operation of simple machinery while your creativity allows you to get to no limit of utter mischief. Get ready to do EEEVVIIIILLLLL!

Loom Blend is another room escape game from Place of Light, who previously brought us Room Fake, Room Bath, Room Marine, and Loom Above. The game's scenario is nothing new: you are in a room filled with diabolical puzzles and more than a few secrets, and must employ all of your wits to escape. A simple premise, but one that Place of Light does very well.

Desktop TD Pro is a substantial new update to one of the grandfathers of tower defense, with new shiny graphics and menacing new "hopper" and "decoy" creeps. With the new Scenarios, Sprint Mode, and a completely customizable Sandbox Mode, this is a strong contender for Best Tower Defense Game Ever.

In the experimental game Gray, you are a white or black androgynous person in the midst of a rioting mob, filled with people of the opposite shade. Your goal is to talk to the people who are highlighted and attempt to convert them to your point of view. It's amazing how accurately such a simple little game can hold a mirror up to modern political discourse.

The unassuming DeepLeap might well be one of the best pure word games to grace the internet in quite a while. Javascript guru John Resig combines the basic gameplay of Scrabble with the sweat-inducing intensity of Text Twist in this fast-paced word-forming game.

Windosill is the story of a toy car, a little blue box with wheels and a smokestack, who one day dares to journey outside of its confining storage shelf. You, armed with the power to touch, carry, poke, prod, and experiment, will lead the toy through a cool blue dream presented in stages, a series of shadow-boxes full of curious characters and structures, each with its own puzzle to be solved.

This is a story of pop-up people who live in pop-up houses next to pop-up castles and pop-up trees. Your goal is to make the right side of this picture-book world into a mirror image of the left side. Headspin Storybook combines fabulous graphics with a creative twist on the "spot the difference" genre, and you'll want to keep playing it till the very end.

How much thought do you put into laundry detergent? I mean, really, is this one of your great concerns in life? Do you wake up in the morning and worry if you made the right decision on aisle ten in the grocery store yesterday? Should you really have gone with that off-brand stuff? Was saving a little cash really worth putting your clothes at risk? Well... was it?

Look! Off in the horizon! Ships with flags with skulls and crossbones! And tons of peg-legged men hobbling right this way! We've got pirates on our hands, and the need to defend against them! Pirate Defense is Hero Interactive's (Storm Winds, Bubble Tanks) take on tower defense games, with a steep slant toward traps and chain reactions. Give those pirates the worst day of their pillaging life.

Snake Ball is a game of mouse skill, in which you, the snake, must quickly score points by bouncing and trapping balls into a pit with your body. Green balls are healthy but score low, while red balls score big but slowly drive your snake insane. An insane snake is a disturbing sight, I'll tell you what.

Can you feel it? That buzzing in the air? That's the feeling of the excitement of a new Nitrome tingling at your senses. Or someone just stuck a fork in the microwave, but it's more likely the former. Power Up is a physics-based puzzler with a high-voltage bolt of challenging fun that lasts for up to 32 levels.

G-Sensor is a solid, well-plotted and very enjoyable escape-the-room game from Japanese developer HILG. You, as a nameless business-person, have checked into the mysterious Uncle Boo's Hotel, and now you can't get out!

Puzzle Defence is a charming mash-up of the SameGame play mechanic with RPG elements. Scary, adorable monsters are attacking your castle, and the only way to defend yourself is to match them together, puzzle/strategy-style. You just want to hug this game and tousle its hair.

Tantrix is a friendly one-player version of the 1988 board game by Mike McManaway, a game that may not have the renown of Scrabble or chess, but still attracts devoted players for annual tournaments. Try to form loops of a single color out of specially-designed hexagonal tiles, in either a puzzle mode or the more improvisational Solitaire mode.

Planet Basher is a blast to play. It's like a gigantic, customizable pachinko machine in space. Your goal is to buy planets and position them so that your rockets bounce off of them long enough to collect the required 200 stars in one round. How many rounds will it take you?

Bipole is a physics-heavy spin-cycle of a puzzler. The goal is simple: annihilate all the cute, smiling particles by colliding them with particles of the opposite charge, taking advantage of gravity and electrostatic attraction/repulsion to gain momentum.

Sentokun in Kamakura is a short 3D action adventure about a monk with antlers on his head, on a quest to defeat a giant, antlered cowboy. At the beginning, the monk is too weak to prevail, so to build up his strength, he must ransack a peaceful coastal town and raze it to the ground. If you liked Katamari Damacy, or you wish there were more browser games that let you throw houses at people, you may enjoy this.

Acting as a prequel to the original, Gemcraft Zero tells the story of a wizard who has become so entangled in his search for the fabled Gem of Eternity that his colleagues have cast him out. Any fan of tower defense games shouldn't miss this one, but even those who may not normally be interested in them should at least give it a try.

The following text was taken directly from the pages of my super-secret diary. Less of a diary, more of a journal. Not so much a journal, now that I think about it, sort of a captain's log. Complete with stardates!

How cute can you take it? If your answer is merely "pretty darn cute", that won't be enough. Even your cursor becomes pudgy and extra cuddly as you set out to help the little Euwins return home. Build bridges across 70 levels worth of waterways in Bridgecraft!

Another haunting opening to another superb point and click game. New from Pastel Games and Mateusz Skutnik, creator of Covert Front, the Submachine series, and The Great Escape series, comes a sequel to last year's desolate adventure, The Fog Fall. The Fog Fall 2 is set in the same post-apocalyptic warzone as the original and is filled with gorgeous artwork, moody sound effects and frighteningly stark locations.

Jmtb02 brings us a cheerfully nihilistic look at traffic, in the form of a fast-paced, fun little reflex-tester. Click on the stop-lights to turn them on or off, allowing cars, buses, and semi-trailers to pass through intersections safely. Can you beat all 20 levels, oh Invisible Sky-bound Weaver of the Woof and Warp of Interlocking Automobiles? Or will the jabbering banjo music drive you insane first?

In this single-player Flash implementation of the card game Sevens, you play a stone cactus, locked in an endless death-match with a room full of other stone cacti, hoping to prolong the sweet breath of life for a few more rounds before The Claw hauls you off to the Great Gravel-Maker in the Sky. No, really.

Loom above is the latest room escape game from Place of Light, one of our favorite room escape game developers. It's not nearly as long or challenging as previous releases we've seen by this developer, and there are far fewer items to find. The puzzles are all fairly straightforward and the game is a joy to play because of how well everything fits together. See for yourself.

Scarygirl is a huge (hours long) and absolutely stunning platform game just released today by a collaboration of companies, including art direction by concept creator, Nathan Jurevicius, an Australian-born artist now living in Toronto, Ontario. Although currently marred by gameplay issues causing player frustration, it is without a doubt one of the most visually appealing browser-based experiences we have ever seen.

Using proprietary physics simulation technology, Collider lets you in on all the particle-smashing action you can handle! Simply annihilate all the charged particles by crashing the positive ones into the negative ones in this gritty physics-based puzzler.

Prizma Puzzle is a new tile-based puzzler by Silengames, strong on aesthetics and brimming with potential. Using your mouse, your job is to form a path of light beams from a source of your choice to all of the pyramid-shaped goals. It's a bit on the easy side, but the snazzy package and a variety of prism tiles make it interesting.

The Leon Wars is a solid gem of a turn-based strategy game, set in a fantasy world where monsters war against humans. It's surprisingly long and can be pleasantly challenging at times, and the tidy, gore-free presentation is easy on the eyes. If you've ever wanted to order a giant flaming sentient orb or a griffon rider into battle, this is the game for you.

Zerosum is an intense variation on match-3 puzzles, with strict policies on winning and losing but vast opportunities for strategy. Easy to learn, hard to master. Make matches by adding adjacent numbers together, but make sure you don't run out of digits to replace them! It's brain candy, once you get into it, like defusing a bomb constructed by an six-year-old arch-villain.

Force your affections on total strangers in Party-Tencho's Kissma, best described as… a shooter? Music game? Experimental whatsit? Retro crazy-fest? Anyway, it's very colorful, and it might change your life for the better. Or for the worse.

We're reaching into the vault of yesteryear -- providing, of course, your definition of yesteryear is a 2005 point-and-click adventure game about supervillains by Nick Bounty, the author of A Case of the Crabs and The Goat in the Grey Fedora". Some of you will be familiar with this strange gem of a title, but if you've never checked into the Brain Hotel before, there's no time like the present to make your reservation.

Sort of a shooterey, retroish, trance music-like Link Dump Friday theme this week. Or is it an old school-style trancey shooter musical theme? Either way, most of these games kinda sorta lean against one or more of those concepts. I guess. Right? Well... hmm. Aah forget it, I'm going back to making music with Tone Matrix.

Orbital Decay pays homage to the Super Nintendo era of 16-bit graphics by incorporating some really cool and interesting strategy elements into the formula of a classic side-scrolling shooter. As the commander of a massive battleship, you must upgrade various weapons and fire your main cannon (the Ultragun!) to defend yourself against waves of crazy-looking alien ships.

It's been around for a while, so we expect many of you are already familiar with A Case of the Crabs, but if Nick Bounty's first point-and-click adventure missed you, now's a great time to give it a go. It's a hilarious parody of classic detective stories, a noir-but-silly tale of a down-on-his luck gumshoe solving the mystery of a murder and a crate full of crabs.

Effing Hail takes place during the worst hail storm in history, and you are the unseen power behind the devastation. By making updrafts with your mouse, keep hailstones growing in the air until they are large enough to crush houses, airplanes, and even skyscrapers. It's time for massive property damage!

These puzzles are the same type of chess mind-benders that still appear in some newspapers next to the word jumble and bridge game brainteasers. Given an endgame position consisting of a few pieces, try to produce checkmate in a given number of moves. The difficulty curve eases you in gradually, and if you're good enough, you can tackle 650 unique puzzles. Regardless of your Elo rating, you'll find a challenge that will suit you with MateMaster.

What's better than a game about a shuriken-chuckin', rope-swingin' cyber-ninja with green glowing eyes and powers of invisibility? Two games about that ninja. Final Ninja Zero is Nitrome's prequel to Final Ninja, with a secret weapon that puts it ahead of any other platform game in a browser: cyborg ninja monkeys.

With just enough challenge to engage, but not overtax, the mind, The Wedding Anniversary is a perfectly mellow respite from the workday world. A simple piano tune floats through the air. Relax, kick back and indulge in a bit of sentimentality... a wonderful room escape game that's more fun than a chick flick.

Bart Bonte knows that at the end of the day, sometimes the simplest rewards are the sweetest. Me and the Key is a series of mini-games that all have the same end — getting the titular key. That's right. There's no zombies, no spaceships, no power-ups. Just you and a slowly evolving set of puzzles designed to test your common sense, and your ability to think outside the box.

What-ho, my refined gentlemen and ladies! We have thus determined that you are the only ones who can help... Captain Dan versus the Zombie Plan! Stealth and quick feet are rewarded here, rather than running pell-mell into a level, gun blazing. Guide Monocled Man through the area using the environment to his advantage, for if he is spotted, he shall quickly be swarmed by ravenous zombies!

Zedray is a highly inventive action/puzzle game about matching beams of light with each other by... well, smashing them together. A mash-up of the Snake Game, Missile Command, and the light cycles from Tron, it's like untangling a living, angular ball of laser yarn. Don't let the beams hit the ground!

Robot Dinosaurs will save the planet! RAAAWWR they shoot beams when they roar! Dino-tastic! ROOOOOAAAAR!!!

The Malstrums Mansion is a retro point-and-click game with a surprisingly tense atmosphere, in the style of old Apple Macintosh adventures like Shadowgate. The heavily pixilated black and white graphics are chunky but lovingly crafted. If you love games that give you the creeps, or if you just like to relive the early years of gaming, this is a title you simply can't afford to pass up.

In ooPixel's brilliant new action game Escape the Red Giant, the sun is about to die, and you have to keep yourself alive for as long as possible by jumping from one asteroid to the next. Between the detailed physics engine and the tight gameplay, you may find yourself addicted without realizing it.

Tower Core is another shining star from John Feltham, the author of the previous "Core" series of games. It continues the story line established in Soul Core without a hitch, and even provides a recap accessible from the main menu. An alien being has decided to attack Earth while it was vulnerable. We can't let this happen. Unfortunately, the planet's defense systems are powered by a special Power Core Deluxe which someone forgot to charge before leaving.

Though it may appear to be just a slightly more colorful clone of Loops of Zen,, Colourshift starts to separate itself when you have to start blending colors together. With a gentle learning curve, plenty of customizable options, and a page of unlockable achievements, Colourshift may just take you by surprise.

Fact: the flu virus can live on ordinary objects for days. Solution? Never touch anything. Ever. In fact, your eyes may be absorbing the flu virus by reading this page. You don't know whose nasty, diseased vision has already seen what you now see. It's gross. Ew. I'm going to the decon chamber now...

A great game for fans of quirky physics puzzles, Civiballs asks you to drop colored orbs into the corresponding urns. Most orbs begin the level suspended in the air by chains and ropes. Your only method of interaction is to cut those cords, and let physics handle the rest, as the civiballs bounce and roll through a network of ramps and obstacles to reach their home.

The latest wacky puzzle from Nitrome, Rustyard has you indirectly leading a junkyard robot with a striking resemblance to Wall-E. You cannot control the movements of the machine, but you can manipulate the environment with its buttons and switches and trolley tracks. Get the robot to the generator and charge up! Bzzzap!

Redstar Fall is a short but wonderfully executed and atmospheric entry in the physics-based stacking/unstacking genre. you begin each level with a pile of oddly-shaped blocks sitting on an island floating in the sky. Click on a block and it vanishes, allowing everything above to shift with the pull of gravity. Your goal is to ease the red star down so it comes to rest on the island.

The sixth installment of Mateusz Skutnik's Great Escape series. By now you should know what to expect; beatiful cartoony backgrounds, quirky music, and improbable contraptions you must build to make your unlikely escape. Oh, and bats. Maybe you weren't expecting the bats, but they're in there too.

Quest for the Crown is not a breeze but a gale, racing down from the frigid peak of a mountain to blast you wide awake from your gaming funk and make you realise the brilliancy of the world you've been missing all along. And maybe — just maybe — change the way you look at the RPG genre forever.

Neptune is quite different from GUMP's previous room-escape games. It doesn't begin with an interesting introductory movie in which a pink-haired character does not encounter a huge building and doesn't decide to enter it, not passing an enigmatic red ladies' shoe that isn't resting on the ground outside.

Monochro Observer is a lovely little puzzle/platform game by Japanese game developer Tatsuya Koyama. Control two people, one who lives in dark and one who lives in light, as they cooperate to reach the exit together. Just look at those little munchkins, staring at each other across the impassable divide between worlds. Lonesome. Longing. The fire of passion smoldering in their eyes…okay, not that last part.

Puzzle Dungeon is a funny little roguelike adventure game written in javaScript. You start off with your stalwart adventurer on the surface, and descend into a randomly-generated dungeon of ever-increasing complexity. Solve simple puzzles to open chests and mine for gems. It's a fun little diversion, a game that you can sit and play for a few minutes of hack-and-slash action and then let be.

There's delicious candy out there for those brave enough to mine it. Spin a giant orb made of coloured candy blocks to make the incoming bullets strike the blocks of your choice. But be careful you don't accidentally let the bullets strike the candy core! There may not be a lot of replayability or depth in Gregory Weir's Sugarcore, but there is a surprising amount of charm and cheek, and plenty of fast-paced puzzle blasting. Treating yourself to this candy won't make you feel guilty.

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Zachtronics Industries has come up with a new "Game for Engineers", and given its central concept you'd think playing it would blow up the space-time continuum. It's a computer game about programming computer chips. Though it may take some time to grasp its centrla concepts, Kohctpyktop: Engineer of the People is a rich and rewarding puzzle game.

Assembler 3, by Bryce Summer, is a game about TWITCHING RAGE or to be more specific, a physics-based puzzle game with 44 levels, in which you must carefully position green objects within their equally green outlines. Maddening and compelling, Assembler 3 is sure to scratch your itch for GRAAAAAAAGH JUST STAY ON THE STUPID WEDGE YOU STUPID CRATE! MRAAAAAAAGH!!!

Drift Runners is a rip-roaring overhead racer from developer Long Animals, with no brakes, a variety of achievements and a hectic pace. Due to the emphasis on drifting, you don't carve the turns so much as shred them. It gets the controls right, it looks pretty, it makes crashing sounds at all the right times, and it rewards you for breaking stuff. Give it a spin.

Quaint room is a relatively short and easy room escape game, but it is also impressively polished and well-made. The graphics are aesthetically pleasing in a tidy sort of way, and the interface is completely smooth and user-friendly. So, take a break. Relax, step back a few years and enjoy this lovely example of classic Japanese gaming goodness.

Double Fine president Tim Schafer is hosting at this years Game Developers Conference, and he's totally unprepared. Help him out by scouring the backstage area for jokes, scribbled on scraps of paper hidden in all sorts of unlikely locations. If you have even the slightest nostalgia for early graphic adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, then this sharp, clever point and click adventure is made for you.

The graphic presentation is fairly simple, but this is a deceptively deep Dr. Mario-style puzzler with a unique color-matching mechanic. Whenever you make a match, you leave behind a ball of a new color, and your job is to work your way up to the top of the rainbow scale. This adds a lot more gameplay dimension than you'd expect, and once you get into it, you will be hooked, trying to make that last couple of levels. Definitely give Combine a chance.

Your job in Nosobow, the newest creation from Tonypa, is to eliminate the non-matching tiles from the screen, while clicking a member of a pair puts you in jeopardy of losing the game. Behind the brilliantly simple design lies a intricate psychological game of self-pacing and concentration that will have you groaning in anguish every time you have to start back at square one.

A sequel to Open Doors, one of the most interesting puzzle games of last year, has arrived, with an arresting makeover and just the right amount of extra spice. Open Doors 2 features compact puzzles with just the right number of new doors and mechanical gizmos. With a sparkling presentation and superb level design, this is one of the best puzzlers we've seen so far this year.

GlueFO 2.0, from the irRegular creators of Sproing Reloaded, has a simple premise: what if the heroic ship in Asteroids couldn't afford ammunition? What if the global recession were in fact universal, and the only way you could afford to bust space rocks was by sticking drifting pebbles to your hull, and then spraying them at the asteroids like deadly gravel?

Some of life's greatest mysteries are the little things you never get answers to. Like why the number of chocolate chips in a cookie is always even, or why your socks seem to keep getting holes in them even though you only wear them with your good shoes. Link Dump Friday is not one of those mysteries. It tells you exactly what you will get, every time! How awesome is that?!

Smokin' Barrels succeeds in wrapping the tension of a high noon six-shooter showdown in an intricate poncho of minigames and economics for a totally enjoyable casual experience where it's shoot or be shot! Will your name be rendered synonymous with "quickest draw in the west"?

What could be better than a game based on explosions? The goal is to get the yellow outlined cube to the bottom of the screen, and the only way to do it is by placing bombs in various locations and letting physics do the rest. The interesting part is how you can time the bombs to move blocks around the screen, one explosion after another.

Have you been wandering around in a haze since the first Perfect Balance, your heart crying out for the opportunity to wedge more things together? Do you miss the wedging like a starving shark misses bluefish? Then Perfect Balance: New Trials is here to offer you sweet, sweet, soul-crushing relief, in the form of 30 more levels of tough block stacking.

The vikings and the ice that trapped them have returned in an expansion on Nitrome's original physics-based puzzle game, Ice Breaker. Ice Breaker The Red Clan introduces lots of new obstacles to deal with strewn about an all-new set of levels. Vikings are trapped in the ice, walled-in by rock, or otherwise prevented from reaching the ship. Using your cursor as a cutting tool, it's your job to set them free. Manipulate each environment to provide a clear path from viking to ship and carve your way through 40 brand-new levels.

Another Room, by Japanese designer Mofuya, is a sweet, semi-short example of classic point-and-click that is executed with near-perfect competence. The game's puzzles are simple but well-crafted; while not wildly creative or different, they nonetheless offer a satisfying variety of problems to tackle. The room's neat, somewhat subdued appearance is pleasing to the eye and makes it simple to navigate the surroundings.

You remember Labyrinth, the board game where you turn knobs to roll a little steel ball to the exit, without hitting any holes along the way? Tilt is an example of the wooden labyrinth in 3D digital form, and an excellent one it is, too. Of course, one of the advantages of a digital version is the fact that the maze configuration does not have to stay static, and it certainly doesn't here. There are 66 different levels, many of them devilishly hard.

Hex Empire is a casual turn-based strategy war game, occupying a comfortable spot between the simplicity of Risk and the number crunching of the Avalon Hill-style board games that inspired the whole soldiers-on-hexagons thing. It lets you jump right into battle without much fuss, and offers enough tactical depth to be addictive even after several wars have ended. A bit of a treat, really.

Ever play Crack the Whip? The game where you hold hands with people in a line and then yank them around until someone loses hold of their neighbor's hand? Gen is a physics game with the same whippy slingshotty action, set in the world of microbiology. Maneuvering your little yellow cells to the big blue cell—without letting them get eaten by the red cells—will keep you swimming happily around in the petri dish for a while.

The microgames come at you at a rapid pace, in succession, leaving little time to recover before the next one attacks with sadistic intent. It reflects the Four Second series, but adds an online leader board, updated in real-time to reflect your standing against other people playing around the world. Whether you sit down for a marathon go or you just want a two-minute fix of quick gaming, you're bound to have a blast with the plethora of microgames in Tiny Trials.

Back to the basics again with Kagi Nochi Tobira 2, the simple and original puzzle game sequel to the very well-received Kagi Nochi Tobira from September of last year. There's not much else to say other than the raw creativity and sense of discovery in these simple puzzle games create an exceptionally engaging and appealing experience. Another example of why simple ideas are often among the most fun!

Each day, for 219 days in a row, Chris DeLeon designed a game. Some began as imitations of classic arcade games, while others, which he calls "commucepts" or "spaquoids", are more experimental in nature. Some have a point to make, some are just good fun. Even with the occasional flop, this fantastic collection of odd and curious web toys can keep you busy for hours.

This is the edition of Link Dump Friday where you do what I say! It's like Simon Says, only Simon's a jerk, so this is called "JohnB Says, Everyone Does". JohnB says... make me a grilled cheese sandwich! JohnB says... comb your hair! JohnB says... play these games below and leave an amusing/constructive comment!

Wizard Defense is a Web-based tower defense game with a rich back-story and polished UI. You play a young wizard who resides at the Espeon School of Wizard Defense, hand-picked to defend the land from evil magic forces and monsters. Multiple path routes and a variety of tower and spell abilities later in the game offer plenty of strategic fun. Rooted by its rich story and dazzling presentation, it's something that every casual gamer should check out.

Bloody Fun Day is a refreshingly original turn-based strategy game from Urban Squall, built around the character of a cute little nihilistic, selfish grim reaper. Your objective is to score as many points as possible by reaping the Cuties, who populate their hexagonally gridded island like dense, colorful game pieces. Their crime is incessant happiness and adorability. Their punishment is a gratuitously violent death. Deceptively well-crafted and deep, Bloody Fun Day is a bloody good time.

50 Comedies asks you to identify the titles of fifty movies (of the comedic variety) based on visual puns. Despite some interface issues, we found ourselves addicted to the clever puzzles and the challenge to our cinemaphile sensibilites. Good for movie buffs, trivia toughs, and fans of fun, light-hearted stuffs.

If you celebrate Arbor Day and always thought a logic puzzle was just what the holiday needed, then Leaf Blight is for you. In this relaxing game, snip off the infected leaves in the correct order to keep your trees healthy and strong.

Today we have two short but excellent escapes for your mid-week gaming pleasure, and they couldn't be more different. One is gorgeously quirky, an eccentric little time-traveling escape game that will fascinate and bewilder; the other is a gritty and darkly realistic game that challenges the player to break out of the confines of a bleak prison cell. So, take your pick... whimsical or grim? Fantastical or gloomy? Whatever you choose, you're sure to enjoy.

An engaging and easy new puzzle game from Joey Betz and the Super Flash Bros. Featuring 30 levels filled with blocks to push, switches to switch, creatures to avoid as you negotiate monkey to the goal for each level. Isometric perspective and a retro look give this little puzzler lots of charm and potential for fun.

Music Catch 2 delivers everything you'd want from a sequel to Reflexive's surprise hit Music Catch, especially if what you want is more ways to collect thousands of shimmering doo-dads. You get three more lovely piano tunes by composer Isaac Shepherd, and a few different choices for how the collectibles will bloom and fade away. Some of the new movement patterns make the game dramatically easier than others, but Music Catch was never about challenge anyway. It's just an easy way to relax, scooping up armfuls of trinkets and grooving to the mellows.

Mofuya Defense is an excellent addition to the tower defense genre, featuring an upgradeable base that can defend itself, and a balanced power resource management system. With cute pixel graphics, a comfortable learning curve, a good number of weapons at your disposal, and additional features not found in other tower defense games, Mofuya Defense is definitely worth investing some time in.

This is the kind of efficient plotting and character design I like to see in a shooter. What's your motivation for exterminating vast populations of cute eyeballey critters? Well, you're Death, you see, and in a shocking twist, you like to kill stuffs. No city in peril, no alien threat—all you want to do is *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* and a *clunk* *ka-ching* and take their money. A smartly-built shooter, with a clever mouse-only control scheme that lets you carve your way through the hordes like buckshot through sherbet.

A mash-up of casual gameplay from the match-3 and RPG genres, Knightfall plays like a cross between Mr. Driller, Same Game and Puzzle Quest. It's a well-balanced and well-executed game with a fun story mode and an unlimited purgatory mode to keep you coming back for more. Achievements add to the addictive quality that Knightfall will bestow upon you.

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