puzzle

Cut the Rope, one of the hottest smartphone games, just got an update to the free standalone holiday version for both the iPhone and iPad (universal) featuring new challenges and holiday-themed levels.

Certain apps have staying power on the top-10 list at the iTunes App Store and Cut The Rope offers just the right mix of challenging physics-based gameplay, family-friendly graphics, and tons of levels to explore to keep it near the top.… Read more

Where's My Water? is a charming physics puzzler, in which you funnel clean water to the bathtub of a fastidious little alligator named Swampy.

Where's My Water? ranks among the better arcade puzzlers, sharing some similarities (fast-paced levels, an intuitive interface, and a winningly cartoony protagonist) but with a central schtick that's mostly all its own: you dig paths through dirt, creating channels for liquid to flow from one place to another. Ideally, you'll get enough clean water into a pipe to fill Swampy's tub, but along the way you have to contend with various … Read more

In Sprinkle for Android, its your job to protect the alien inhabitants of Titan, a distant moon being bombarded by flaming asteroids. Armed with a gigantic water cannon, you venture from level to level extinguishing the falling asteroids along with all of the other neighborhood fires they happen to ignite.

Each level challenges you with a number of rampant fires, each on the verge of engulfing a Titanite's home. All you have to do is aim your cannon at each set of flames (sometimes for a few seconds) to make sure that they are completely extinguished. Sound easy? Well, … Read more

If Scrabble and Boggle had a digital love-child, and that love-child were then adopted by Bejeweled, Dropwords would be it.

To start, you get a five-by-five board of lettered tiles, with each letter worth a certain number of points, a la Scrabble. Your objective is to use these letters to make words and score as many points as possible within the allotted time. A word can be made up of any number of connected tiles, and can go in any direction, just like in Boggle.

But what makes this game different from Boggle is that after you find a word … Read more

Dropwords for Android is the digital love child that Scrabble and Boggle never had. In other words, it is a word nerd's dream come true. To start, you get a five-by-five board of lettered tiles, with each letter being worth a certain number of points, as in Scrabble. Your objective is to use these letters to make words and score as many points as possible within the allotted time. A word can be made up of any number of connected tiles, and can go in any direction, just like in Boggle.

But what makes this game different from Boggle … Read more

Cut the Rope: Experiments is a fun follow-up to the arcade puzzler Cut the Rope, with a few new elements but the same core concept centered on inventive physics challenges, well-designed and replayable levels, and a cute little candy-loving monster named Om Nom.

The interface is the same: you swipe your finger to cut a rope (occasionally more than one, with multitouch) to drop an attached piece of candy into Om Nom's mouth, a task that becomes increasingly complex with the addition of floating bubbles, dangerous spikes, movable anchors, elastic ropes, and so on. As before, you're also … Read more

Contre Jour is an arcade puzzler that veteran gamers will see as a mashup of game mechanics and inspiration from several other popular titles. That said, Contre Jour is a well-executed melange, a fun and often challenging puzzle game with polished art and sound.

On each short level of Contre Jour, you're trying to get a charming little alien (essentially, a rolling eyeball) to the level's exit. The alien doesn't move on its own, so you need to use attached ropes (some elastic, some not, some with movable anchors), slingshots, malleable ground (which you can shape with … Read more

Well here's some interesting timing. Just days after I finished playing Portal for the very first time (more on that in a bit), Steam is offering the game absolutely free.

Specifically, from now until September 20, you can download Portal (PC and Mac) absolutely free. Yesterday, it would have cost you $10.

Update: Many readers have reported difficulty signing up for a Steam account. My only suggestion is to keep trying, as I'm sure Steam's servers are overloaded. I'll update further if I learn anything more.

Update #2: Steam tech support just tweeted this fix: "… Read more

If World of Goo and Cut the Rope somehow got sucked into a black hole, Contre Jour is what would emerge from the other side. This breathtakingly beautiful and relentlessly addictive puzzler isn't the most original iOS game ever, but it's definitely one of the most wonderful.

"Contre jour" translates literally to "days against," but in this case it refers to a photo-backlighting technique. And once you eyeball the game's lush backlit levels, you'll understand the reference.

But it's hard to escape comparisons to World of Goo, not just in the level design, but also in the goo-ball-like "hero" of the game, Petit. The little guy's nothing more than a gelatinous eyeball, and it's your job to roll, fling, and otherwise maneuver him to the glowing blue orb---collecting as many glowing lights as possible along the way.… Read more