A quick one tonight, as it’s late already and I’m at the point in drinking where it’s go to sleep soon or soldier on and call in sick tomorrow morning. That I’m still not entirely sure which road to go down is strangely reassuring to the bit of me that worries I’m getting old and safe. Now on with the games!

Splume, like girls with bad name theory and the Q train, is the absolute wrong sort of thing to encounter at this sort of late and drinking time of night.

Level progression and degree of challenge move along as smooth as can be while the visuals and sounds lull you into the sort of puzzle haze the bravest of men are lucky to emerge from before the sun comes up. It’s Snood with a brain and an art style some one actually cares about – eyeballs watch and judge your every move before exploding in a squishy mess when matched, which is both extremely satisfying and a little sad. It casually surprises in the way the best puzzle games do, breaking conventions (like, say, the artificial boundries of the game world enforced only by the limit of the window size) as soon as you become accustomed to them. Proceed with caution and time to kill.

Hoshi Saga 2 is engrossing for entirely different reasons, opting to be frustratingly compelling instead of deceptively so. This is by no means a bad thing.

It’s a collection of thirty-six mini-games with the same instructions: find the star. The same trick never works twice, though, and the definition of “star” is hardly limited to a five-pointed drawing or heavenly body. There are several brick walls to run into here, but even more opportunities to feel immensely clever for working through one particularly strange bit. It’s also very much a Japanese game, and there’s at least one puzzle where you’ll have to dig deep down to find your inner otaku if you want to solve it. All in all its very well done, with even the gleefully obtuse puzzles showing off the skill of the developers. Should you run into a problem, ask for help in the comments section. I quite like the idea of this becoming a group effort.

Filed under: Flash Games