Download Games Roundup
Quell! Ski! Primrose! Fur! See!
Quell
- iPhone / £0.59
Fallen Tree Games evidently knew that critics would most likely be writing reviews of its raindrop puzzler to the accompaniment of the incessant thrum of inclement weather.
Played out against a soothing acoustic guitar backdrop, Quell’s game of coaxing fragile raindrops to safety is enough to make you want to get your woollies on and go and chop wood.
Finding myself strangely bereft of an axe, playing 70 levels of Quell will have to do for the time being. It's a hard life at the coalface of journalism.
Set in a series of hazard-strewn environments, Quell asks you to collect all the pearls in the shortest number of moves without busting up your delicate raindrop. Although it moves in the direction of your swipe, the raindrop doesn't stop until it hits a wall - or bursts against a spiky obstacle.
With the pressure on to figure out the best route, the designers then turn up the heat with all manner of trickery to throw you off your coveted prize. Sometimes you'll need to head into warp portals, move blocks and flick one-way switches to complete your tenuous journey.You'll be barely aware you've swished your way through a few dozen puzzles, such are its woozily hypnotic charms.
At less than the price that airports charge for a packet of Extra, Quell is yet another way to make you feel Zen about spending hundreds of pounds on Apple hardware.
8/10
Primrose
- DSiWare / 200 DSiWare Points (£1.80)
On any other day, the idea of flipping colourful tiles to infinity probably wouldn't have had much appeal. There's only so much entertainment you can reasonably expect to extract from a seven-by-seven grid.
Sabarasa knows this, and that's why, for once, you'll only be charged a measly 200 points for the privilege.
It's just as well, because there's really not much to Primrose. You have to place a pair of tiles down, and then try and strategically organise subsequent tiles so that you eventually surround it with a uniform block of one different colour.
Once successful, surrounded tiles flip to the colour they're surrounded by, while any surrounding tiles disappear entirely. Got it? Good. That's the entire game.
It's never quite as simple as it looks, though, as you're restricted in having to always place the second of the two tiles in either the same row or column as the first one. And with the colour of each tile that you have to place randomly changing every turn, you can't even plan ahead, usually leaving you with a horribly disparate selection of incompatible tiles and rapidly diminishing number of empty spaces.
If you like the sound of a desperate multi-storey car-park bun-fight in puzzle form with slightly less pointless anger, then go right ahead. Me? I'll take the bus and continue to ponder why Zoo Keeper still hasn't come to iPhone.
6/10