Timeless: The Lost Castle is every bit as fluid and dynamic as its predecessor, Timeless: The Forgotten Town. Nothing feels stuck in place in this game, you just hop from puzzle to puzzle, genre-twisting location to genre-twisting location, hoping to find out a little more about these strange dreams you've been having or that mysterious orb. Plus, it's got wizards and airships. You can't go wrong with wizards and airships.
In Retrovirus you take on the role of an anti-virus program sent out to track down and destroy a particularly nasty worm that's infected the computer in which you reside. But as an "Agent" inhabiting a world of bits and bytes that's shaped to resemble our own, the process is very hands-on: Your tools are the digital equivalent of shotguns and rocket launchers, and the worm and its minions are doing their level best to kill you. It's not without flaws, but somehow this strange, low-priced indie game turned out to be one of the most entertaining shooters I've played in an awfully long time.
Who doesn't love a good old first-person puzzler to whittle a Sunday afternoon away, hey? Pulse Shift promises literal twists and turns, as you make your way around a variety of platforms and obstacles, all simply by rotating your view 90 degrees at a time, and in turn changing the direction in which gravity is pulling.
Let's face it: time management games are a dime a dozen, so it takes a lot for a game to stand out amongst its many peers. Unfortunately, Meridian: Age of Invention doesn't invent anything new in the genre, and it stands out for all the wrong reasons.
Green City is a building game similar to Build-a-lot 4: Power Source and Plan It Green that focuses on resource management while tasking you to rebuild an entire city. You've also got to keep an eye on the Earth, cleaning up the town's act so they stop tossing garbage out the windows. Mind that eco score while clearing out the rubbish and you just might make some progress!
In the town of Wallachian, it isn't a very good idea to go bar-hopping at night. In fact, violence in the town has gotten so bad that one local bar-maid has resorted to removing the door-knockers off her tavern. Bodies are filling the morgue, and even the doctor inspecting them has wound up dead. But luckily for the villagers, the town cleric had the wise insight to hire you, a renowned Constable known for sorting these kinds of messes out. Unluckily for you, however, it looks like you'll be dealing with something more than your run-of-the mill killer.
Mountain Trap: The Manor of Memories does what many hidden object games are afraid to do: be a hidden object game. It's straightforward to the extreme, dropping just about every extra feature and gameplay gimmick you could imagine in favor of old fashioned item hunting. This could have been a disastrous decision, but somehow Mountain Trap came out the other side unscathed and ready to be played.
A year ago I was blown away by Boomzap's first Otherworld game, Spring of Shadows. The minute I finished that game I was looking forward to its sequel, and was tickled this month to be asked to review it. One hour into Otherworld: Omens of Summer though,it occurred to me that there are two scary things about achieving perfection: there's no way to improve upon it, and it's often impossible to live up to it.