Veteran swashbuckler Ron Gilbert knows a thing or two about pirates. He created the classic PC game The Secret of Monkey Island as well as its successor, LeChuck's Revenge. Sometimes, though, a sea-dog needs to dock in a different harbor. Aside from its pirate theme, Scurvy Scallywags, a match-3/combat game for iOS, is a bit of a departure for Gilbert and his partner in crime, Clayton Kauzlaric. Happily, it's a fun game that boasts the charm of a siren chorus.
There's a growing tendency towards abstract, single-serving gameplay that is beginning to define the casual gaming space. As the ultimate renditions of pick-up-and-play, entries like Hundreds, Mosaique, and Blendokuhave dropped shiny gems and cutesy creatures for the sake of simplified, streamlined, and perfected puzzle mechanics. Although not a genre definer alone, Color Zen is a worthy addition to their shapely ranks.
Lemmings was a novel game during many a childhood, especially if you grew up in the golden age of PC gaming. It was a bizarre exercise in sending the helpless creatures to their death if you weren't quick or savvy enough to figure out an escape route. It was gleefully morbid beneath the veneer of cuteness, and offered multiple enticing layers of strategy across several different games. WildTangent's Penguins! Escape is a clone that takes the cuteness factor of Lemmings and ups the ante, by giving you hundreds of adorable little penguins marching along from a start point to an end point that you must safely get them to. It's nearly the same game, but it's adapted for iOS players and touch controls. And it's actually quite fun.
Chronicles of Albian 2 takes us back into the magical world of Albian, as players are challenged with repairing the Wizbury School of Magic by collecting hidden objects, selling them for a profit, and then using those earnings to upgrade walls, buildings, islands, and much more. Its predecessor's charm and whimsy is definitely back in full force, along with some new gameplay elements that make this an experience not to miss.
Beautiful, surprising, challenging, and subtle, Quell Memento runs the player through a gauntlet of puzzles that range from elementary to devilish, but it's the game's emotional undercurrent that you'll ultimately remember. Snippets of exposition trickle out as you guide your rain drops through stages and memories. This is Braid as a marble maze.
A Tetris reboot on touchscreen devices from Electronic Arts should by all accounts be a mess of awkward controls and microtransactions. Tetris Blitz retains little of the sentiment from the 1984 original, but inventive and frantic gameplay, mobile sensibilities, and cues from Pac-Man Championship Edition DX combine to make this the Tetris you want for the device you have. It also uses the word Tetriminos without irony.
Every so often, an intriguing little indie game comes along to remind us why we ever fell in love with video games in the first place. Whether it's because of a unique and different presentation, or simply just the way it invites you to play, games like these are what make it so much fun to work at Gamezebo every morning. Well it looks like Mushroom 11 might just be one of those games. And it's not just me saying this either: the mesmerizing new game was even awarded "The Best of Indie Press Day" for 2013.
Sometimes you play a game so simple yet so effective that it leaves you wondering why no one has done it before. Meet Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe, a sort of Tetris match-3 and platformer mash-up that gives as good as it gets. With twinges of Spelunky in there too, this fast-paced, quick-thinking blaster will kill you every few minutes, and yet you'll keep coming back for more. The soundtrack is sublime, the controls are spot-on, and the challenge is very, very real. What I'm saying is, you're going to love this game.