Maze Evolution is really simple. You just guide a little star through some tunnels and corridors. Also, you mustn't touch the walls. Oh, and some of the mazes are moving. Did we mention there will be things shooting at you? No? Never mind then, you'll do just fine! *shifty eyes*

It may look sweet and simple, but don't let it fool you, because this Sokoban-style puzzle game is going to tie your brain into knots. All you have to do is slide crates onto spots marked with an X, but with thirty stages, each more tidily and cleverly designed than the last, Sokoboom proves it has what it takes to keep you challenged.

Here's a simple idea: Using your mouse, trace paths across a board of black and white tiles so that the white tiles you've selected turn to black. Sound too easy? Mateusz Narolewski will make you wonder if someone's been replacing your breakfast cereal with paint chips.

Combining avoidance gameplay with puzzle elements, the queerly named ...=D starts off slow and easy, but in no time at all will have you sweating bullets as you struggle to keep up with a game that more and more resembles a chaotic disco dance floor!

Where in the world are you? You'll need a little world knowledge and some deductive skills in this puzzle game that uses Google Maps to plop you into unknown territory you can explore to try to figure out your location, and then point to it on a map, for a challenging and addictive little game.

The winner of the minimalism-themed Ludum Dare 26 game jam, Mono, a Java game by Timtip Games, is a uniquely artistic top-down mix of puzzles and skill. In it, you must guide an eye through a series of eight levels. It's over far too fast, but it's densely packed with interesting ideas and a well deserved victor.

Everyone Together is a tough little stumper in a meek, unassuming package, and it will give you the urge to go back through your various contact lists and catch up with people you haven't gotten in time with for years. You know exactly the ones I mean!

Stargazers is a minimalist puzzle Ludum Dare entry by Cake and Zeik that's sure to have everyone watching the skies. An interesting variation on connect-the-dots, Stargazers may be short, but it has astronomical amounts of polish.

Perfection is a simple, casual puzzle game from Dumb and Fat Games, creator of Sling It! and Phantasmaburbia. It tests your spatial resolve by challenging you to slice bits of an object away until it fits inside an outline. There's no timer, there's no move limits, and there are no missions to complete. Just some relaxing music and a great game of self-challenge at your fingertips.

Explore a mysterious paper world and help the Paper Titans reunite as they work together in 45 levels to gather up three stars and reach the envelope sealed with a kiss. Fold up these quirky characters then put to collecting, throwing, flying, exploding and shamaning past obstacles in an elaborate 3D world which is instantly accessible via a touch and a swipe on your mobile device. Playing more as interactive art than a challenging game, those who enjoy distinctive visuals and relaxing gameplay can let their imagination run wild in this papercraft playground.

You've been abducted, but after hours of travel, you've taken your chance to escape. You need to figure out where you are and quickly. Pursued is an HTML5 puzzle game designed by Nemesis Games, powered by the Google Maps Street View engine. A unique, if sometimes slow-loading, experience, Pursued will take you on a glorious world tour.

Now you too can be a minimalist artist! Mondrianism is an ingenious interactive art game, in which you get to play with Mondrian's paintings. Move one coloured rectangle around, absorbing all the others, until there's only one colour left on the screen. And you thought this art thing was difficult...

Yoshio Ishii has another question for you, and in this third installment of the addictively clever puzzle series, provides even more smart and simple levels where you'll have to think outside the box. Or circle, I suppose. All you have to do is read the question and figure out which circle you need to click... even though they both seem identical.

Combine squishy blocks according to colour. What could be simpler, you say? Not much, but it's important to remember that simple doesn't always mean easy, and this free stylish little indie puzzler will give you far more than your value with its devilish design and 40 levels.

Live Puzzle is a jigsaw game by Pipkin Games that presents players with a fun set of animated pictures to reconstruct, with subjects ranging from fish, to spirals, to planets, to cards. The animation is clearly a gimmick, but a cool one, and the developers definitely put thought into how different puzzles would be solved in different and interesting ways.

Laser Puzzle is just what it sounds like: A puzzle with lasers. You've got to redirect the colored beams to the receptors, but instead of freely dropping mirrors around the grid, a series of mirrors and filters on wheels must be turned until the beam finds its way. This clever take on an old chestnut is only five levels long and will leave you craving more, but it's the perfect length for a short coffee break.

Developed by AtomicCicada, this block-sliding puzzle game takes an old concept and turns it on its head with a simple tweak. Giving a much-appreciated twist to a familiar format, Push Me is a refreshing and unexpectedly original piece of logic puzzlery. And with 100 levels, it'll keep your brain occupied for a nice while.

If you always enjoyed Smart Code Games' superlatively fluid physics puzzle but felt it was a might tame, this poison pack of 30 additional levels gives you a potent new purpose to your plumbing job. Arrange the pipes, valves, bombs and teleporters then click the start switch to route the glowing green toxic liquid into its respective containers, measuring amounts properly to not waste or spill. With virtually no instructions, the puzzles won't hesitate to tease your brain with byzantine constructions, giving you plenty to scratch your head over for most the afternoon or evening.

You're bored kid with a box cutter in a room full of boxes. Ready for rainy day crafts time? Turn the boxes into shapes by clicking a point outside the box then drawing a line all the way across it to cut off that piece. You're limited to specific types of cuts and, as the shapes get much more complicated over 30 levels, creating them with 100% similarity becomes quite tough. Slice the Box is great way to while away time in a relaxing, creative endeavor.

RedWhite Slice is a short action puzzle that's a mix of Fat Slice and JezzBall, whose strength is in its level design and aesthetics. It's not very long or difficult, but at about ten minutes of tidy design, it's a great way to spend a coffee break.

It's a good-natured game of turf wars as you clear the board of all but the last monster standing. Simply roll an adjacent monster into another monster to push him off, continuing the process until all but one remains. Over time, the set-ups are more complicated requiring strategy and planning to complete.

Pink is nice, but spikes? Not so much. Paint all other colours pink in this gravity-defying platformer, but avoid getting impaled! A simple idea that will challenge your reflexes and brighten your day in the space of a coffee break with its bouncy design.

This party is hopping, but it's hard to enjoy it when someone wants you dead, and everyone is strange enough to be a suspect. Created in just seven days, this simple but uniquely stylish little puzzler has you asking questions of 24 monsters to figure out who's trying to kill you before they get to you first. That's... an extreme sort of party game. Couldn't you have just played charades?

Although you've been asked this question before, there are more ways to distinguish the differences between two seemingly alike spheres. That's why this pleasantly straight-forward puzzle game from Yoshio Ishii is so good to play. Throughout twenty levels, you'll decide which of the two circles before you has the requested quality. At times obvious, other times needing lateral conclusions or outside knowledge, More Which? is just challenging enough to be gratifying.

At first, it's rather easy. You have a game panel of a few colored squares and, using color affecting tiles, your objective is to change your panel to match that of the target. Then it gets progressively more difficult. Challenging puzzles plus chill music, though, always makes a good match for a game break anytime.

The way of the Samurai involves keen eyes, swiftness... and puzzles! Use your sword and a limited number of slices to cut down blocks until they fit in the shape provided. A simple idea that will provide more of a challenge than you'd think and require a lot of mental dexterity to win.

Vested Interest's mouse-driven puzzle game starts out simple but quickly gets... weird. Your job is to align squares and figure out patterns before completing them, but the deeper into the game you go, the more you'll realise this game is far more clever than it seems at first blush... meow!

The protagonist of Pipikin Games' new arcade puzzler, Crazy Digger, seems to be able to eat all the gem and dirt he wants, and not gain a pound. Oh well, at least on this side of the screen there's less danger from chomping green things or cascading boulders. A simple and addictive time-waster in the Boulder Dash vein, if one with background music most will quickly mute.

All you have to do is click, so how hard could it be? Koutack is a gorgeously simple little puzzler where you're trying to combine all the squares on the field into a single stack by clicking between adjacent ones until all of them are nested cozily on top of one another. Easy? Not quite. Lovely and relaxing? Abso-tootly.

There are two circles in front of you: Circle A and Circle B. One of them has a certain quality. And the question you must answer, in this puzzle game by Yoshio Ishi, is simple: Which? Figuring out the challenges will depend less on logic, and more on playful experimentation to determine what the developer had in mind. This can be occasionally frustrating, but all of the levels are quite clever, making for a quality five minutes of fun.

Coming out of your shell can be hard, so wouldn't it be nice if everyone looked the same? After all, we'd all be happy then, wouldn't we? Talha Kaya delivers a personal puzzle-platformer mixed with an art game to tell the story of a guy, a girl, and figuring out who you are and what matters most is action.

It ain't easy bein' green, especially when you're a lone frog in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and all you have to eat are mutant flies who want to take a bite out of you too. Monzazart serves up a familiar but quirkily-themed little physics puzzle where you'll use a truly remarkable tongue to climb, swing, pull, and lift your way through levels and hazards.

Underneath that rainbow of squares lies demons galore! Cool demons, though! Mamano Digger is a simple idea puzzler by Hojokama Games that makes the SameGame formula feel a little different. A minimalist gaming experience that probably won't have much replay value once you've beaten it, but you probably won't be able to stop playing until you do.

Spin had a girlfriend, but he fell down a hole! What else do you need to know? Spin Spin: Chapter 1 and Spin Spin: Chapter 2 are a pair of puzzle platformers by Chris Hughes that take the simple ideas of world-spinning and spike-avoiding, strip them down to its minimalist essence, and the result is truly something special. Presentation is a little no-frills, but these are very cleverly designed games.

Ready, set, fold! In this simple to learn origami puzzle game, your folding skills will be tested like never before. Enjoy a relaxing atmosphere as you try to create various shapes with your paper with a limited number of moves. Origami has never been so much fun!

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.

Bart Bonte delivers a deliciously swank yet simple sliding block puzzle with a holiday spin. Push, pull, stack, and stick using the incredible powers granted to you as a magnetic star in order to assemble the shape in each stage. A stylish exercise in clever, clean design and gameplay no matter what time of year it is.

Game Balance's series of sliding-puzzles is back with a shiny new coat of sparkles in Orbox C! This installment may be a little heavy on the glitz and techno music, but the intelligent challenges should appeal to fans both new and old.

Smart Code Games is back with another puzzling brainteaser that will test your plumbing mettle. You can leave the overalls and the wrenches at home, however, because your tools here as you seek to fill up pots with just enough water are everything from magical mathematical multipliers to teleporters to freakin' bombs. Plumbers lead a much more interesting career than we ever imagined!

Get the rabbit to the mushroom by only moving along the coloured path that matches it. Easy, right? Except this quirky little puzzler piles on new elements, like locks, moving platforms, freezing tiles, and much more, for a simple concept that still manages to remain challenging as you play.

Bart Bonte's particle physics puzzle goes mobile with 35 all new levels plus (of course!) a sandbox mode. Thousands of sugar particles pouring down onto the screen with no place else to go until you draw a line here, another there, and a bit of gravity manipulation in the middle to direct all that sweetness into the cups. What begins as a simple task steadily increases in complexity until your cup overflowth with fun!

Slide Circus is a straightforward but gorgeous mobile puzzle game from qbcode. Using a simple sliding grid, it creates a soothing but challenging puzzle experience that can be as easy or as complex as you like, scaling to suit your needs. It's a bit like solving an intricate jigsaw puzzle, only here the pieces stay neatly together and you don't have to worry about the dog eating the edge of the minute hand from Big Ben.

We Create Stuff and Armor Games takes their popular and beautifully simple puzzle game to the iOS with entirely new levels. Dismantle 3D structures by pushing, pulling, and twisting the individual pieces until you find just the right configuration to let it all slide apart. Elegant, clean, and polished to a mirror finish, Interlocked for your mobile device is exactly the sort of simple, casually engaging and clever puzzle game we'd love to see more of.

In this sliding block-style puzzler by Mibix, a flying squirrel faces off against the natural predator of all rodentia: zombies. The cartoony graphics don't quite mesh with the strategic gameplay, but the levels are well designed and the scream the squirrel makes as he flies off the screen is schadenfreudely hilarious.

It's Snake! It's Snazzy! It's Snazzle! A simple idea puzzle game by Amidos, Snazzle takes its inspiration from the classic formula of slithering reptiles extending themselves by chomping on fruit, and trying to avoid crashing into itself. However, by modifying the premise with a shiny coating of tile-based programming logic, it makes for a fresh and cleverly designed experience, though perhaps a little off-putting in its symbolic minimalism.

The world needs saving and only you, Kumo Lumo, a fluffy smiling cloud, can save it in this innovative mobile arcade puzzle game. Billed by developer, Blitz Games, as a "rain 'em up!" you are tasked with two things—grow up the good, drench out the bad—your only arsenal being a sprinkle of rain and a blast of lightening. It's a simple concept that puts a little sunshine into being a raincloud.

Ozzie Mercado is certainly a one and only, and One Bubble is the latest in a string of quality simple idea puzzle games. Jumping and eliminating bubbles, with naturalistic backgrounds and soothing music makes for a zen office-toy feel, perfect for an afternoon de-stressing.

Tick tock on the clock, but the party won't stop, because Ozzie Mercado has just released Twelve O, another wonderful, simple idea puzzle game! Thinking rotationally can be mind twisting, and while the mouse controls can take a little getting used to, Twelve O makes for a great time-waster.

Developer Ozzie Mercado is on quite the roll with his simple idea puzzle games. His latest is a cool little sokoban-variant named Push3m, that shows that squares can still be hip. It takes a bit for the challenge to get going, but for the most part, it is a short, sweet, and very clever game.

Robot wants dots! Okay, the star of Robot Arm, a simple idea puzzle game by Amidos2006 might be missing his torso, head, and legs, but his desires are no less poignant. Robotic Arm offers a cunning test of spatial logic that should appeal to any fan of mechanical manipulation puzzles.

Do you like simple puzzles? As in... do you like them a whole lot? A hundred levels' worth? Then Blocks is the perfect straight-forward little match-3 puzzler for your coffee break. Slide and match coloured blocks to remove them from the screen in as few moves as possible. Simple, but cleanly designed and surprisingly addictive, Blocks is perfect for relaxing, thoughtful puzzle fun.

The Happy Dead Friends are back with 60 new player made levels. In this puzzler, use your mouse to move zombies, skeletons and other creatures around until there are no free hands. Some creatures have unique abilities which can make them difficult to match up. See how many moves it takes you until everyone is holding hands. It's the only wat to make everyone happy!

It's always interesting when a developer takes a familiar mechanic, then remixes it to make a new kind of enjoyable puzzle. Case in point: Jump Me, a simple idea puzzle game by Ozzie Mercado. It's likely that the game would have never have been made if versions of checkers hadn't been kicking around since ancient times. But that allows Jump Me to be different enough to feel fresh, but familiar enough to easily learn.

Gear up for some bizarre new words that wouldn't make it past any English teacher's red pen with Xether Labs's free iOS word puzzle! The concept and gameplay is simple... figure out the clues and fill in the blanks to reveal the strange new word you get by combining the two solutions. Best enjoyed passed back and forth on the couch with a witty and weird friend, it's the sort of breezy, simple, silly game mobile devices seem perfectly designed for to help you enjoy yourself whenever you have a spare moment.

Who knew that the Four Color Theorem would make for such a nice simple idea puzzle game? OneFifth's Flood Fill is a fun and colorful way to fill up a coffee break, even if its 20 levels are over way too quickly. But hey, the background music is catchy.

The developers at Stolen Couch Games have captured that child-like kindergarten drawing time feeling with the one-button puzzle game Ichi, a mobile port of the downloadable version available for Windows and Mac systems. It is only the team's second commercial creation for the iTunes App Store, but they understand that quality is much better than quantity. If the simple visual style makes you think "oh, this game will be a piece of cake!", well, my friend, you'll think twice when level 'some-odd-number' comes around and you can't master it!

A certain giant nuclear lizard and his fellow monster nemeses have had exclusive raging rights in Japan, but has their reign finally come to an end? Adult Swim along with PikPok Games is contesting the monster mayhem supremacy with an arcade-style puzzle game for Android and iOS called Monsters Ate My Condo. As it heavily parodies the Showa (aka monster) era of movies, you need to appease the behemoths by feeding them condo buildings for super high scores until your apartment tower topples over. Your building may fall and the game will end, but you will keep coming back for more of this frenzied arcade action.

Ever since Pac-Man first escaped off the right side of the screen to magically appear on the left, players have had a certain thing for games that skew traditional notions of spatiality. The Village Blacksmith offers another wonderful take on this kind of teleportation in Recursion, a cool little retro puzzle platformer. The series of single screen levels progresses nicely, even if the jumps require a bit too much precision. Still, Recursion worth playing over and over again.

Looking for a logic puzzle game that is tested and designed with cognitive physiology research AND is still fun to play? The boys over at Handy Games in Germany bring you infeCCt, a nice casual undertaking that gets you covering tiles with vines. The game will bend your mind to its limits with tons of impressively designed levels, extra obstacles and tiles for an added challenge, and online scoring system to compare your problem solving skills with others.

This grid puzzle game from Gluk has forty levels of zombie networking challenges, plus a level editor, offering plenty of achievements and endless fun. Make every creature happy by arranging them along a grid so that each is holding hands with his friends. While not entirely original, Happy Dead Friends is well-made and has enough unique qualities to warrant praise and smiles.

Scan each scene in this short but thoroughly interesting spot-the-difference game by FlashRomance, seeking the sometimes obvious and other times minute incongruities between the mirrored images, then set them right with a quick click. An aesthetically diverse array of inner city settings with atmospheric sound effects, music and animations add deeper dimensions to your exploratory fun. The eyes can be fooled and the mirror is deceiving, which is why finding the Errors of Reflection can be both challenging and gratifying. So use your powers of observation and take a poke at both sides of the looking glass—the beauty is in the details.

Centered on the mechanic of changing your color to interact with different objects, Coloraze, a puzzle platformer by Colin Brown, is a simple concept done well. It's one of those works where a string of gameplay elements are introduced in the beginning, then paid off in the long run with a string puzzles that force them to interact in interesting way. Each individual level won't take too much time to play, but with a good ninety included, plus a solid number of levels made by the community using Coloraze's solid level editor, you won't be running out of game any time soon.

Legend tells us of King Midas, granted a gift by Pan that all he would touch would turn to gold. The tale is the inspiration for Midas, a puzzle platform game by Wanderlands, and overall winner of the Ludum 22 Game Jam. In it, you must guide the king to his love, but not before you reach the river that will wash him of his "gift". The theme for the competition was "Alone", a word that's perfectly captured by this short, challenging, and even poignant game.

Interactive art has a reputation for being light on the challenge, but These Robotic Hearts of Mine, a puzzle game by Alan Hazelden definitely shows that it doesn't have to be. It's a simple game of gears and direction... one that I would love to see re-created in the physical space of a gallery. However, each solution presents another line in a story of technology, hearts and heartbreak. The puzzles alone would be fine, and the elegy is affecting. However, the combination fits like one hand into another.

Dim the lights, light the incense, and settle in for some relaxing puzzlement with Coins. Slide the coins around from starting position to goal position in forty soothing levels. Ahh. Sounds easy, right? In the first twenty levels, you can only move a coin to a place where it's touching two other coins. In the second twenty, it must be touching two coins of different colors.

If there's one thing all of us could use in life, it's a sense of perspective. At the very least, having one will certainly help you in Blueprint 3D, the new puzzle game from Zedarus . You must use the mouse to rotate an apparently incomprehensible mass of illustrations to find the point of view where the whole plan will come together. It's a game that certainly won't leave you blue.

It's always fascinating when a developer, having come up with an engaging idea for a puzzle game, tries to justify the premise after the fact with a storyline. Case in point: Mysterious Treasures by Sky Mill, which spins a simple grid-based strategy game of getting more coins than the CPU into a high-seas pirate adventure. It's a simple little game that makes for big fun.

We hold a truth to be self-evident that all squishy bouncy blob thingies are born with certain inalienable rights, including those of life, liberty and the pursuit of hat-iness. The hero of Pursuit of Hat, a puzzle platformer from Anton Rogov, is willing to risk all manner of life and limb for his head-covering... mainly limb though, since his are detachable. Literally tearing ones self apart over a head-covering may seem a little extreme. In all fairness... it's a pretty sweet hat.

Straight from the ghastly hallows of Nitrome comes the hobbling horror of a humdinger, Stumped! As a hopping foot that can only make right turns, can you bounce your way to the exit while dodging piercing spikes, frightening firepits, and eerie eyeballs?

Damian Sommer created this short, no-frills little puzzle platformer to throw the player into a series of one-screen, "extremely distilled metroidvanias." He accomplishes this by first teaching the player some rudimentary game mechanics and then builds upon those rules incrementally while increasing the difficulty and complexity of each level's design. And it works quite nicely for a game made in just a day and a half.

Think you can play platform games? Try this challenging game from Paradoxon Games and test your reflexes to the bitter edge... all so that Stu can get a night's sleep. Following in the tradition of VVVVVV and Gravinaytor is Sleepy Stu's Adventure, probably the hardest platform puzzler game you will play this year.

Bripitol, a sort of deliberately-paced matching game, continues Tonypa's run of designs for games that are simple, easy to grasp, yet unique and compelling. With appealing abstract design and soundtrack from Kevin Macleod, Bripitol is a fine edition to Tonypa's library of puzzlers.

There's a tremendous amount of brainbusting to be found in such a tiny puzzle game as this. The shortest distance between two points certainly isn't a straight line here, as you'll end up making circles around yourself to find the correct path to the exit. You only have thirty spots to move to, but you'll be trekking around the grid for a good long time. It'll be pretty hard to pass up this Impasse.

As per usual with Tonypa games the difficulty curve in Regrebluli is pretty steep, but that's about the only complaint there is with this addictive, entertaining game. The one thing we can always count on with Tonypa is a simple idea (plain stark graphics and elementary gameplay) done exceedingly well.

14 Locks, the latest game from Bart Bonte, is not strictly an escape game but it is still fun to navigate your way through the imaginatively decorated spaces, each one becoming more elaborate than the last. Bart has created something that is pretty exciting and amusing to play with this Unity platform, although it can be a little nausea inducing, so please be warned.

Cathode Rays starts out simply enough (with only one ray to handle), but the difficulty quickly ramps up as you're required to thread the rays through tight passages and time your movements to match moving and fading planks. Soon you'll be trying to manage four beams at once in sparkly vector glory. Can you wrangle these ridiculous rays?

Choo Choo Puzzles, the new simple idea dragging puzzle from a team led by Piotr Iwanicki, sounds like a cross between a candy bar and a maze you'd find in Highlights for Children... kind of inappropriate for a fun little game with only a tenuously abstract connection to railways. Fortunately, the simple mechanics of Choo Choo Puzzles present a worthy challenge for puzzle-lovers of all ages.

A polished take on a puzzle favourite, this tricky game will have you coming back for more anr more as you try and get your blocks onto the red line. There are forty-nine stages to complete as well as a neat level editor to facilitate your own creations.

Art meets puzzles in Fernando Ramallo's simple but challenging title. Let the hypnotic colours and abstract animations soothe your brain as you shift and rotate portions of the image until everything snaps into place. Despite a lack of variety and one simple mechanic, Dependant offers a lovely respite from fast-paced twitch gaming and remains accessible to just about anyone to boot.

It's a simple idea wrapped up in one great presentation for Interlocked, the 3D puzzle from We Create Stuff. Figure out how to take apart increasingly elaborate sliding block arrangements; the pieces are locked together, and it should be easy for you to puzzle out how to pull them all apart... right? The perfect treat to start your week off right.

There's something inherently soothing about sliding puzzles. No wait, hear me out. You're just thinking they're frustrating because so frequently they're the obstacle in your escape or hidden object game, the puzzle that rears its ugly mug when you just want to open up the safe or fix the breaker system. But if you distill it down to its essence and give it a relaxing ambiance, there's something pure and satisfying about sliding some blocks around, and that's just what this game from Ateta Games delivers.

Tonypa has once again given us cunningly executed casual gameplay exquisite in concept, design, and execution. Despite the difficulty Jorinapeka is a game that just begs you to play it over and over, striving to reach that ever elusive "end".

Tealy & Orangey is a retro platformer with a twist. You use the arrow keys to navigate the two colored protagonists from start to finish in each of twenty hazard-filled levels. The thing is, you can't control just one or the other; you always control both characters, whether you like it or not.

Make friendz in this monstrous puzzle game that has you chaining unhappy monsterz together. Created by Jean Privat for the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition's theme of friends, Monsterz has a simple presentation but offers just enough challenge to really make you think.

Monomaze, by Diffusion Games, is a futuristic arcade puzzler based around a remixing of the game of Dots. Place lines to complete loops and gain points, while gaining extra turns and exploding bombs. A game that cries for a multi-player mode, but is very good by itself.

Starlight Xmas is so sweet and uncomplicated. It offers us a moment to relax and unwind, gently reminding us of the meaning of Christmas while indulging our senses. So take a break from the everyday, immerse yourself in a simple yet magical game and maybe you'll emerge singing "Fa La La" like that happy little, sheep-herding Christmas pig.

Vanilla, jeans, thunderbolts - there have been many variations and 'improvements', but nothing that beats the original. That also goes for many puzzle games and while people are less inclined to meet an old favourite during an adventure game, on their own they hit the sweet spot. That, more or less, summarises my opinion of Bomboozle 2. It might not break new ground or usher in the new era of 'pop the colors' puzzle games, but this take on a classic isn't broken either!

Liquid Measure 2 mixes Pipe Mania, water collection puzzles and simple idea physics into a nice glass of flash gaming fun. The difficulty is perhaps overly easy, but the mechanics are clever and the professional presentation should quench your thirst for a half hour.

Bart Bonte's Me and the Key sent us all on a voyage of self- and key-discovery. But the hunt for the self/key is an eternal quest, is it not? Luckily, the journey has been lengthened by another 25 levels in Me and the Key 2. As you progress through this series of abstract thinking puzzles and mini-games, maybe you'll discover that the key that you were searching for was around your penguin-thing's neck the whole time.

One of these things is just like the other. One of these things, oh it belongs. Can you tell me which thing is just like the other, before I finish this song? If you just had a flashback to a kinder, gentler time of your childhood spent in hypnotic rapture before a television, take For the Twin for a spin.

Ready for some spelunking? Descend into the depths of this fiendishly difficult little isometric puzzler, where the goal is just to get to the exit... which only opens once all the floor tiles have fallen... and is usually behind some traps, switches, and unbreakable green crystals. All in a day's work!

Remember those choking-hazard-tastic plastic maze toys you would get as a kid, usually as a dinky prize for something? Relive those happy memories in Sand Trap, a puzzle where you rotate a box to pour the sand trapped within into a pail. It's another fine HTML5 game from Gopherwood Studios, and a runner up in our Casual Gameplay Design Competition #8.

Following in the footsteps of Bob, it's... King Arthur? Yes, the liberator of Excalibur and avid collector of round tables has his own 'one click' action game. How many click does it take you to finish his adventure? And can you beat the records in the comments?

Mamono Sweeper is very similar to its ancient ancestor with some key differences. The first is that instead of bombs concealed behind anonymous tiles, you're sweeping for monsters. And you can't just avoid them, eventually you're going to have to reveal and kill all of the monsters on the board if you want to win. Slay monsters, go up in levels, and relive the addiction that was once minesweeper in this reboot of one of the most well known classic casual games.

What's black and white and red all over? Nothing yet, as we seem to be needing more red! Paint It Red 2 by MoonMana is an interactive art game disguised as a puzzle where your black canvas needs to be covered with red paint as quickly as possible. In each level, paint flows across the screen, following (or not following) the movements of your mouse. If you guide the paint to cover a certain percentage of the screen, you unlock the next level and have the opportunity to move on... or not.

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.

Cosmicube is one of those 'older games with a new twist' releases that you see every once in a while. The game uses the Unity engine to render a 3-D take on Marble Madness. The marble's track is made of red cubes mounted on a larger black cube. Your goal is to get a marble from its starting point onto the goal by moving your mouse to tilt the playing field. You're aided (and hampered) by an impressive physics simulation that feels very authentic and real, all while listening to a fast-paced soundtrack that fits the action and setting well.

If the fast pace of modern life is bogging you down man, just take a few minutes, listen to the sublime acoustic guitar tunes, and realign your inner peace with these balls of light, dude. Light up the clear spheres by removing balls until the lighted sphere touches them. It's that easy dude, no joke. I told you I would take care of you

An enticingly simple game of shifting dice, the challenge ramps up quickly in this exquisite puzzler from Ozzie Mercado. Each die can make a number of moves equivalent to the number on its face, and it's your job to make sure that every die ends up in one of the square-shaped "zones" by the time it's expended all of its moves. Click on a die to select it, then drag your mouse in a direction and release to slide the die in that direction.

Think you know games? Think you know games when their only representation is obscure and abstract imagery? Across decades and platforms, The Challenging Stage is a single screen test of puzzles and trivia where you have to guess the titles of 56 games, new and classic, from the weird images used on screen.