This is quite clever. You move a little man through a maze to get to the “end of screen” door, picking up keys to unlock barriers and avoiding jumping or moving onto the spikes.
So far so normal. However if you press the shift key, everything inverts - the screen dump actually shows the same screen twice, both normally and when it’s inverted. (Inverted 180 degrees and flipped colour).Lots of screens to get through and you will need to press shift as well as think outside the box. Very clever.
BTW, both this and the previous game are by Armor Games- a coincidence but also a tribute to the quality of their games. (And no I have no connection to them, financial or otherwise!)
Popularity: 9% [?]
The point and click puzzle genre has grown out of nowhere over the last few years and there are lots of them around. The idea is that each screen is a visual puzzle. When you click on part of the screen something happens. You have to figure out the ordering and solve that screen.
Where they vary is the degree of animation, sounds etc and the difficulty of the puzzles. The Grow puzzles are more logical while in Curious you have to help the main character escape each screen. This is guaranteed to keep you puzzling for quite a while!
Popularity: 15% [?]
A nice colourful and simple to play puzzle. It works on the same principle as the plastic sliding blocks puzzles I did as a kid, where I had to slide the pieces to solve the puzzle. I.e. there is one gap so you can move any piece that can go into that gap.
Here you click on a car to drive it into the space and continue until all the cars in each level are in their colour coordinated parking spaces.
Popularity: 8% [?]
This is a really simple puzzle but it makes you think.
Just place the hexagons so the number on each hex matches the number of neighbours. They change colours, green means too few neighbours, yellow is right and red iis too many. When all are yellow you go onto the next level.
As you can see I got to level 21. Some hexagons can’t be moved so it gets challenging. An excellent puzzle.
Popularity: 5% [?]
I haven’t tried all 31 yet but the one shown is a clever game where you slide blocks of symbols up, left, right and down. If you get 3 of the same next to each other they vanish and you get points. Very simple but ingenious.
Also of note, if you want to learn how to write flash tiled games like this, there are a considerable number of tutorials on his site.
Popularity: 10% [?]
This is a lovely collection of puzzles (I counted 27) by Simon Tatham. Not only are they cross platform, running on Linux, Mac and Windows (I’ve only tested them on Windows) but they also include full source code in C. You can download a 2MB archive file with all the source code files in them.
Of course they’d be even handier still if they were written in Flash and you could play them online! Any takers?
Popularity: 6% [?]
This is very good. There are 28 puzzles ranging from very easy to hard. In each one, all you have to do is arrange the pieces so that when the ball drops, it is guided to the target.
The one shown is the first one and takes little effort to solve but they do get harder, much harder. You can reset the pieces at any time but you are always working against the clock and when it reaches zero, it’s game over.
Popularity: 4% [?]
This is a good time waster. You have a gun that you can change the angle with the cursor keys. You get a number of shots though you can restart any level. The playing area has stars which exert a gravitation pull on your shots. You have to figure out (by trial and error) the correct angle so that your shots hit the target and not the stars or exit the screen.
Easy to play- it just needs space bar and cursor keys input but some of the levels can be quite tricky and they get trickier as you progress. I’ve got to level 11 so far.
Popularity: 3% [?]
I like this- for simple entertainment, an online jigsaw puzzle website.
As well as the traditional jigsaw shapes you can choose blocks, triangular cut, wavy, jigzone (a mixture including some letters!), polygons, round, even Tetris and many others. Some of those are difficult, as are the smaller pieces - you can choose up to 247 pieces.
A flash application, this is very nicely implemented and with a new picture every day and lots in the archives this is an excellent piece of work.
Popularity: 3% [?]