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It's an Artifex Mundi point and click / hidden object / puzzle game! I have no shame in finding these to be a guilty pleasure, because they're a nice change of pace from more demanding games. This one maintains the devs' usual decent standards, with generally good presentation throughout (with some weird exceptions, as though a different artist was roped in at knife-point to fill in certain gaps). The formula does wear a little thin towards the end, and there's a certain sense of going through the motions that's not evident in the first two thirds of the game. You know the drill: explore locations, pick up items, do hidden object scenes to find necessary objects to solve puzzles (in this game, they really like "swap the pieces around so they form the right picture / match the background"), and listen in horror to some stilted voice acting. It starts well, with much drama and a cutscene that they probably blew half the game's budget on (this probably explains the marionette-like animation later in the game), and then settles into a comfortable formula. Towards the end it actually starts to get, dare I say it, quite exciting! I nearly spilled my tea at one point. The dramatic music helps, and threads begin to wrap up towards the big showdown, but it never really challenges you and feels a bit anticlimactic. If you get "stuck" it nearly always means there's a new hidden object scene that's opened up somewhere on the map, and you have to wander around until you find it. Frustratingly, there are occasions where apparently useful objects can be seen in the background art, but which are non-interactive (in reality the location of the object you need is elsewhere). It's sloppy. Removing useful objects (like a hammer) and then requiring you to find another one later in the game is also annoying. However, like its terrible voice acting (one actor is wildly inconsistent, seemingly forgetting the character he's playing mid-sentence on several occasions), it comes with the territory.

Wow, where do I start with this one?! Ok, Continue? is definitely an acquired taste. It begins with a beautifully drawn-out introduction on the death of a videogame character. Yet, he doesn't want to die. He escapes deletion for a while, and it's your job to keep him alive. While that sounds like an interesting premise for a game, Continue? doesn't stop there. Oh no. You quickly realise that the developer is trying to tell you something, and it soon turns into a reflection on life, on death, on childhood, love, freedom, knowledge and the inevitable. Each scenario that you play through is meant to be a prayer, not necessarily in an overtly religious sense (in fact, the game never comes across as preachy) but more in a sense of inner prayer, inner discovery for who you are, and what the important things in life are. It's not surprising that the developer made this game following a near-death experience. It does make you wonder whether there are better things to be doing with your life than playing a game, but that's beside the point!

Yes, there is a game here, but it's a long, drawn-out game full of interludes and reflection. Let me warn you, if you're not the kind of person who can sit through 5 minute long dreamy interludes, this game is probably not for you. Even the introduction, beautiful though it is, is completely unskippable each and every time you begin a new "life". When you eventually reach the gameplay, you're in a for a shock: it's hectic! You need to dash around looking for characters to speak to. Each will give you a clue, or a cryptic message, or open a door to a building. Getting information and opening doors is essential, because it's here that you can choose to either destroy sections of barriers that impede your exit from the level, or construct more buildings in your sanctuary town (more on that shortly). There's a strict time limit here, and you're also being chased around by chompers (servants of the garbage collector trying to delete you) that will drag you away to mini games if they touch you. Mini games happen every 45 to 60 seconds, and are either 2d riffs on simple arcade games, or 3d exploration / combat games. None last long, yet if you fail you will suffer the consequences! Each failure usually leads to the destruction of buildings in your sanctuary, and this is fatal if you aren't careful. Every two levels you will be taken to your sanctuary to survive a garbage collection "storm". Several buildings will be destroyed, and you need buildings to shelter from the storm. Run out of buildings, and you get deleted. This is how you die in the game, for real.

This gets really frustrating when you're having a run of bad luck. Finding characters, talking to them and making "prayers" to build your sanctuary or "lightning" to destroy exit barriers is very random; sometimes you might run around like a headless chicken for 20 seconds without finding anyone to speak to (and when the time limit for each deletion attempt is 45 seconds, that's a long time!), sometimes the lightning hits the same piece of ground over, and over, and you "waste" valuable time trying to escape the level, sometimes the price you pay for making a mini-game error is the deletion of 80% of your sanctuary buildings (other times you get off lightly). It feels unfair at times, yet when it's going your way it feels wonderful. It's as though the developer is telling you that life sometimes sucks!

Yet despite all this, I love the game. I really shouldn't, it does all these things that annoy me, and yet it's... it's just compelling, somehow magical, relaxing even if you're in the right frame of mind for it. If you're not, expect to rage quit! (it's CTRL+Q btw). I wouldn't blame you.

It's hard not to be charmed by Driftmoon, and that goes a long way towards making this somewhat straightforward, graphically modest game such a joy to play. The writing is infused with a very European sense of humour, and it wears its influences proudly. The story isn't particularly deep, but the characters are witty, eccentric and weird, including pirate-talking crabs and condescending panthers. It's all set in a rustic world that's packed with little details and witticisms, and while the graphics and art aren't going to set your world on fire, the simple physics and lighting system is enough to sell it. I thought its only weakness was the combat, which is best described as serviceable: click on monster and you (plus companions) auto-attack, with damage and attack speed based on your character's stats. You can also "cast" various abilities and buffs to assist, but really there's not much strategy to it except at the higher difficulties, but that seems somewhat counter to the gently charming feel of the world for some reason. I was happy to move on from combat and continue the story, and meet another of Driftmoon's crazy inhabitants, then bumble along beaches and caverns looking for tantalising goodies. And if you like searching for hidden items strewn across the maps, behind doors and under tables, you'll be right at home.

Artifex Mundi probably make the best hidden object / point and click adventure games, no exception here. To say the setting is a rip-off of Bioshock is putting it lightly, and the storyline lacks any of the nuance of that game, but it's suitably atmospheric and the gameplay uses it well. As for the rest, it's a point and click adventure game interspersed with set-piece puzzles and hidden object challenges. The artwork is very good, the character animation is pretty dated, the puzzles are mostly fairly undemanding although there's the occasional headscratcher (usually due to missing a vital clue or scene somewhere, so you'll need to search the entire map at times), good music and - as usual with these games - truly dire voice acting. Still, there's something about these games that makes them a nice, relaxing diversion.

This game originated on iOS, and it shows with the grind-centric gameplay. It starts off promisingly enough, a decent twin-stick shooter with satisfying feedback, rolling and cover mechanics, and an upgrade system. Trouble is, that's it. Each new mission is essentially the exact same thing, through the same basic scenario (some generic future industrial rooms), with the same type of gameplay: strafe and shoot. As you level up your weapons, so the enemies level up in strength, which means it actually doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere at all. Really, level 10 feels exactly the same as level 1. The only variety is a gradual reveal of different enemy types, although nothing here will surprise you, and a slow unlocking of weapons and armour that you have to upgrade with coins and upgrade tokens. It's here that the iOS origins really show, this quest for coins that you gradually amass, the need to repeatedly play the same levels to find the right tokens to upgrade your weapons, so you can keep up with the enemies. Around level 10 is when the game introduces stun-lock enemies that are a massive pain in the butt, and very hard to avoid as they travel quite a bit faster than you can, and take some putting down. That was about as much as I could take. I'm sure you could get a couple of hours out of this, but that's not enough to recommend it.

Circuits is the kind of puzzle game I'd like to see more of. It's essentially a very simple music sequencer, 25 short pieces of music (chillstep, ambient) with a "stem" that acts as a timeline. You're given a handful of nodes, each containing short musical phrases or snippets of percussion, and you have to put them on the correct placeholders along the stem. You can play the entire piece of music and drag the timeline slider to any point, so it's pretty easy at first to build the song. Later levels get a bit more difficult, with subtle chord differences or slight variations in note timing, and nodes or sequences of nodes that must be allocated a certain amount of repeats, but unless you're tone deaf it's not too difficult. It's a neat concept, the music is worth a listen (the OST is included), and it's probably a fun way of learning the very basics of song composition. The developer has promised some harder levels in the future, as the basic game will take you about 2-3 hours to finish.

Everyone, buy this game now. What do you mean, what kind of review is that? Ok, ok...

First, I've played this game for hours when it was released on Desura. I know a bit about this game. One Finger Death Punch is a brawler; it's just you against hordes of opponents. If you hate brawlers, or this genre in general, I have news for you. OFDP is not one of those games. It's a game about timing. You use your mouse (or, if you're a sucker for punishment, a controller) and click either the left button or the right button. That's it. That's the entire game right there. Except, until you actually play the game, you won't realise just how incredibly well realised this simple control system actually is. Enemies approach from the left and right of the screen, with you in the center, and when they move into range you have to put them down in the most bad-ass kung-fu way possible. To achieve this, you click the left or the right mouse button depending on whether the opponent is on your left or your right. Your fist / foot connects with your opponents head / chest in a suitably bone-crunching manner, and you feel good. And it continues like this, getting slowly faster and faster, and increasingly insane, until you realise you have a huge grin on your face and you're kung-fu fighting like a master. Rarely has such a simple game offered such empowerment and the simple joy of looking awesome. It's also the closest many of us will likely come to a pure zen state of concentration.

There's more to it that that, with different enemy types that require different combinations to defeat, a variety of weapons to use (melee and ranged), a selection of power-ups that become increasingly important on the later, more difficult levels, and a variety of different game styles from straight-up mob action to laser sword rounds and mono colour rounds. The game just keeps throwing new and inventive stuff your way, and that grin rarely leaves your face. I won't spoil some of the better surprises, but there are quite a few.

So yes, buy this game and play it, and if you don't like it then you're probably already dead, or something.

I really can't recommend Starpoint Gemini. This was LGM Games' first project, and I'm afraid it shows. I can see what they were going for, but it just doesn't come together in a satisfying way. Presentation-wise, the game manages to look dated (ship models) and beautiful (nebulas and planet vistas) at the same time. I can live with that. I could't live with the voice acting though, which I'm sure must be done by the dev team, or someone they kidnapped off the street. Fortunately for the sake of your sanity you can turn this off. More worrying though is the UI, which is confused, overly complicated, and a royal pain in the ass. Even basics such as turning your ship aren't handled well: you can either left click to turn the ship towards the point you clicked, which is useless for anything to the side or behind you, or you can hit the A and D keys which turn the ship in what seem like 30 degree increments per press, with multiple presses resulting in prolonged spinning until the key presses wear off. It's manageable once you get used to it, but it's painful and makes combat a drag. That's a pity because the combat engine is fun at first, it's nicely tactical and lasers sizzle and whump appropriately, but I found it soon became frustrating due mainly to the very high early difficulty; your ship only has a narrow firing arc, everything else it seems can out-turn you, so lining up to take a shot means your front shields are quickly toasted with you being barbequed shortly afterwards.

The other problem is that the living universe is merciless, and high level rogue (pirate) ships crash your nice low-level party with frustrating regularity. I had to replay the first mission about four times because I kept getting jumped by high level pirates that laid waste to everyone including my puny level 1 ship. It's a pity the quicksave button doesn't work, because you have to save a lot... except it doesn't actually let you save during the prolonged and tedious dialogs and during mission events. Eventually you start to get a handle on things, and there were moments such as the first time I flew inside a nebula that the game almost starts to sing, but then it's gone. Side-missions from stations largely involve flying to a point and clicking a couple of icons, or flying to a rogue ship and getting blasted within seconds. After a few hours I realised that I just wasn't having any fun because I'd played this game before in much better forms. However, the silver lining is Starpoint Gemini 2, which is apparently so massively better as to be a completely different game. I'd start there if I were you.

There's a moment in The Swapper where, for a few magical seconds, everything comes together. It's the moment shortly after you get the Swapper device where the game teaches you its potential. It does it in such an elegant way that it's a revelation; suddenly, the platform game you thought you were playing gets subverted, the possibilities seem vast, and the game exploits these possibilities in the various puzzles that it subsequently throws your way. To explain it would be to spoil it. There's a point in any puzzle game that I dread, though, and it's the point where it all becomes too much for my brain, where the developers start to throw the kitchen sink at you, and each puzzle becomes hard work rather than fun. In retrospect, The Swapper never really does this, but there were moments when faced with a seemingly impossible puzzle that my brain threw its figurative hands in the air and went off to sulk, muttering something about getting old. I admit that I had to look at a walkthrough for some of the later puzzles, the solutions to which are only elegant with hindsight. Still, I needed to progress because I needed to see how the story played out, touching as it does on life, morality and - momentarily - spirituality. The Swapper does a great job of drawing you into its cold, echoing world; it feels like Alien without the alien. The modelling style that's used to build the facility gives the game a unique look, realistic without being real, and the ethereal soundtrack completes the unsettling picture.

The only thing that annoys me about this game is the title. "Catch Me When You Can"? When I can what? Be bothered? Find the time? It doesn't sound like much of a challenge! However, the game itself is better than its title.

Angelica Weaver is a psychic cop. Wait, it gets better! Actually, it really doesn't, but when it comes to fruity storylines these hidden object games usually take the biscuit anyway. Honestly this one is better than most, and it provides as good a hook as any to find all those hidden objects. I also appreciated some half-decent voice acting for once, at least with the main character, who fortunately is who you'll be hearing most of the time anyway. I do like the fact that hidden object games have such strong female characters; some other games could learn a thing or two.

The game itself is a pretty good point and click adventure game for the most part, collecting objects in your inventory to apply them in other locations. It's not quite Monkey Island, but it's a good time. There are quite a few puzzles throughout the game, although you've probably seen their ilk before, and they're mostly easy. Stress free, you might say. You'll also find quite a few hidden object scenes, and really that's what we're here for right? Fortunately these are very good, some nice artwork and objects that help to push the story forwards, often prompting brief pieces of dialog from the main character. Even better, you can replay all of these from the main menu later to try and find every last object in the scene, rated by your speed. You'll only do this once after which you'll have memorized where most things are, but it's nice to see.

The game will last you at least 5-6 hours if you do the bonus content as well (which acts as a suitable epilogue to the main story), and another hour on top of that to do the infinite hidden object scenes, so it should keep you busy for a while. You can also unsettle your friends and family with Angela Weaver specific wallpapers and screen savers [not tested].