Addled
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| Addled

Addled, baffled, befuddled, confused, confounded, stumped… even occasionally thwarted. Yes, these are some of the things you'll be feeling as you play through this tight-as-a-gnat's-chuff puzzle game from Northern Ireland's Clarity Games.

Based, like all the really great puzzle games, around a simple premise, Addled twists huge complexity from its core idea. There are blocks coloured in four different hues, and you must move them around the screen one by one, colliding same-coloured blocks to make them disappear. Once they're all gone, the level is complete. Which is fine when there are only two of each colour, but when there are three it all becomes slightly more… addling.

The levels are played as though you're looking at them side-on, not top-down (sometimes a bit hard to tell from screenshots), so gravity acts on the blocks. Push one off the edge of a platform and it'll fall on to whatever's below, and because only same-coloured cubes will disappear, you can stack different coloured ones up. You begin to realise that just rapidly shoving blocks around isn't going to get you very far, as each level is cunningly crafted so you have to figure out which colour to move where and in what order to do so.

With a couple of hundred levels on offer in Addled, things are kept from getting too samey by the introduction of new elements once every ten levels. Pac-Man-style teleport holes appear in the edge of levels, allowing you to push blocks out one side and back on to the other – or drop them out of the bottom and back in through the top. In other levels, ice cubes appear that shatter after another block lands on them twice.

Another nice twist Clarity has included is the ability to skip up to ten levels as you play through. If you get really stuck, just skip that level and try the next. Once you've skipped ten, it's not game over – you can go back and retry the puzzles you avoided, and if you succeed you'll earn a skip back. We really like this idea; it fits the friendly feel of the whole game.

Graphically, Addled isn't the title to show off your Nseries, but it has the feel of a game that'll keep you coming back for more, and with 200 levels there's plenty more to be had. It's a well-considered mobile game that doesn't rely on fast graphics or quick button presses, a game that you can dip in and out of as you like.

Our only criticism is really that it might have been nice to have an incentive to retry levels, perhaps based around how many button presses you took to complete it.

It's a telling compliment to pay that we could imagine a smartened-up version of Addled on the Nintendo DS, using the stylus to drag the pieces around. It has that kind of feel; a slightly off-the-wall, classic-yet-fresh take on the ages old block puzzling genre. And that's just fine by us.

Addled

Old-skool graphics, maybe, but 200 puzzles will last a lot of bus rides
Score