Lost Toys

The things you remember as being great from your childhood are, by and large, rubbish when you come back to them in the later years of your life.

This isn't anything to be sad about - it's just because you, like most children in the world, were an idiot. A glorious lolloping idiot full of hopes and dreams, but an idiot nonetheless.

All of this makes the odd mournful tone of Lost Toys an even harder sell. It's a lament in puzzle form, an elegy for lost youth in the shape of a 3D block-slider.

But its admittedly gorgeous music and firesale in an empty room aesthetic make odd bedfellows with the building block shifting puzzles that are the heart of the game.

Throw in a dollop of frustration, and some horribly wibbly difficulty curves, and you're left with a game that's a bit on the flimsy side.

A series of gloomy mobiles hang in a gloomy room, and hanging from each gloomy spoke is a cherished childhood toy. Think wooden cars, terrifying cubist clowns, and poorly painted non-cuddly dogs.

Unfortunately, these toys have been mangled by some unseen hand. And possibly set on fire by some unseen fire. It's up to you to twist around the blocks that make them in order to put them back together again.

You have a set number of moves in which to accomplish this feat, and if you try and go over that limit the edges of the screen start to fuzz in hangover blur orange and the toy doesn't budge.

The twists are all controlled by pushing and swiping on the toy, while dragging a finger around next to whatever broken thing you're trying to mend moves the camera around for a better view.

The puzzles start off simple enough, with a few pokes and prods required to put the toy back the right way round and magically fill it with shiny colour again, but there are some incredibly tough ones later in the game that almost demand you use the hint system.

Solving the puzzles never really feels like that much of a triumph, though, and quite often you'll stumble across a solution through trial-and-error.

It makes for an experience that's fun in small doses, but which shows its creaking inner workings once too often during prolonged play.