Another grab-bag review post. When I’m not busy coding or taking care of other business, I’ve been sampling a few games at a time. On the PC-side, I finished Samorost 2 and attempted Cortex Command. I’ll also briefly recollect my experience playing Aquaria from a couple of years ago. On the iOS-side, I’ve touched a bit on Rune Gems, Water?, Block Jungle, Badlands, and one that’s not quite a game, but is interesting nevertheless, ARTREE.

Samorost 2 was a game I started some time ago, but it got lost in the ether. I remember playing through the first stage, then putting it down, then I’m not sure what happened because I never marked it off of my list and I never wrote a review on it. The developers for Samorost 2 were also responsible for Botanicula and the point-and-click adventure base is pretty much the same. While considerably shorter, Samorost 2 was still a delight to play with quirky interactions, characters, and puzzles. It did have a couple of shortfalls, mainly with having a general difficulty in trying to locate things that were clickable (the target area was often small) and sometimes avenues of travel were not accessible unless you were standing in the correct spot. I finished the game in the equivalent of a Sunday afternoon. It is not fast-paced at all, but even a leisurely play won’t require much of your time. If you’re looking for something relaxing, this is the game to play.

Cortex Command, on the other hand, was frustrating. I think I still have an early build of the game and when I read the warning messages, I was expecting the AI to be nonexistent or something fairly easy to beat. Instead, I ran into a literal killing robot that wouldn’t stop at anything. It is a third-person shooter-type game in which you are essentially a disembodied brain in control of multiple robots, although you can only control one robot at a time. Aiming was difficult and using the jetpack to get around was difficult. I never did finish the tutorial stage, even though I attempted it twice. I had no desire to keep trying.

Aquaria was a game I played a couple of years ago and I can’t find any previous reviews I might have written about it. I initially had some problems playing the game because my graphics drivers weren’t up to date, but once I figured that issue out, the game itself was sort of interesting, but didn’t quite capture my attention entirely. I vaguely recall some music system that was the equivalent of using magic in traditional RPGs. Again, it was interesting, but it didn’t make me want to reinstall the game to continue.

Rune Gems was a game that kept me occupied for a good few nights. I think of it as a hybrid of Mahjong Solitaire and Match-3. The goal is to clear the board by matching three tiles with the same astrological signs. However, you can only remove tiles that are unobstructed from other tiles, that is, you cannot select a tile that has another tile sitting on top of it. Edge rules don’t apply as they do in Mahjong Solitaire and tiles that are surrounded by other tiles on the same level but have no tiles on top can be selected. I got up to level 4-point-something before it became clear that you’ll have to purchase upgrades if you want to keep going. Since I got the game for free, that’s fine with me as I don’t particularly feel like I’m getting sucked into microtransactions, but I was reading reviews from less-than-satisfied customers. Two of the upgrades you can purchase is an undo and automatic tile converter to one of the tiles you have in your buffer, clearing two tiles from the board as well as one tile from your buffer. Your buffer can only hold 7 tiles, including any 3 you match (so you really have 4 spaces for holding tiles). Each new game you start is random and the higher the board (the number of tiles stacked on each other), the harder it is to clear without using any of the upgrades. It is also more likely the random stack of tiles will cause you to fail than win. That is the large drawback of this game. Otherwise, I found it fun to play and could easily lose myself for an hour wanting to “play another round.”

Water? is a Disney game that I was hesitant to get at first, but turns out it wasn’t that as bad as I thought it would be. Swampy is one of the characters in the game and reminds me a bit of a puppy.. who enjoys taking baths. The goal in each stage is to get water, either an infinite amount from a pipe or a standing amount, through soil and other obstacles into Swampy’s tub. There are side goals like getting rubber duckies (which absorb a certain amount of water) and finding hidden treasures as well. Your main tool is your finger which makes a path through the soil that water or other liquids can follow. There’s a purple poison goo that is necessary to clear plants, which you can’t dig through, but the goo is obviously not a good thing to put in Swampy’s tub. There’s another red liquid I encountered briefly on the weekly challenge page and as far as I can tell, mixing the red liquid with the purple goo creates soil. There’s a lot of stages and it’s a fun game to play to pass the time. I haven’t encountered many timing-based stages. Most of the stages are largely pre-planning and makes for a relaxing session, but it does require some brain power.

Block Jungle is a take on a sliding-puzzle-type game. There are horizontal blocks and vertical blocks which indicate which direction they are able to move (horizontal blocks can only move left or right, vertical blocks move up or down). There are treasure blocks, also capable of only moving in two directions. There are also spring blocks and bridge blocks to make things more interesting. The goal is to move the treasure block to the goal square someplace off of the board itself. Sometimes there are multiple treasure blocks to get to different goal squares. I haven’t played it too much as I’ve generally been desiring less-thinking type of games lately, but I didn’t find any glaring frustrations or run into any obvious roadblocks while playing. I may keep it on my phone until I notice I haven’t touched it in a couple of weeks, then remove it.

Badlands was an interesting game to play. It’s pretty much a tapping game based on timing. The graphics is much like Limbo with silhouettes. I had a lot of fun watching the background with various animals with their sinister-looking eyes. You play as some odd bird thing and each tap sends him flying higher. There are various upgrades and downgrades, depending on the context of the obstacles you are running into. You can make yourself bigger (and harder to fly) or smaller, faster or slower, and even rotate. You can also make clones of yourself, essentially creating more lives and you can bring clones with you to the end of the level as a side challenge. At first, it may seem like your bird-thing is indestructible, but getting crushed by a boulder or flung into a wall can kill you off, as well as falling behind as the camera does do a little bit of a side scroll. I didn’t have many frustrations, but I haven’t gotten too far into the game yet, either. So far, I’ve found it fun to play and I expect I’ll be loading it up a few more times before I put it down for good.

ARTREE is not really a game, but it is a relaxing app. You can create your own trees and customize them as you like with the shape and number of leaves and flowers, as well as what the shape of the tree will ultimately take. You can even draw the base tree and watch the app generate the tree using that base line. It’s something I’ve loaded up a couple of times when I just needed to wind down, sort of a zen-like app for when you just need a break from the chaos of the day.