Roman Konyukhov's laid-back physics puzzle game Simple Motions has, appropriately enough, a simple concept; use a red ball to collect all the stars on each level, and then get to the flag. Of course, you can't control the ball directly; you'll have to place tokens that direct how it moves and reacts. Along the bottom of the screen you'll find a series of icons that, when dragged onto the screen, will cause the ball to behave a certain way when they come into contact with it. Hit "start" to see if your devilishly laid plan works, and "edit" if you need to tweak some things. You've only got a certain number of tokens to place each level, but don't worry about failure; not only does the game show you the path the ball took the last time you hit "start", but if you're particularly stymied you can just click "menu" to get an option to skip whatever level you're on. You can't just skip your way through the whole game, since you need to complete at least one stage in order to skip another.

With a mellow soundtrack and a light, clean presentation, Simple Motions has a friendly style to go with its friendly gameplay. It's not necessarily a challenging game, or even a particularly original one, but it might just be the absolute perfect recipe for a relaxing bite of gaming. Besides, can't we all learn a lesson from Red Ball? It's not healthy to race around all the time. Sometimes, you just gotta go with the flow and let the universe take you where it will. Yeah, man. The Ball abides.

Play Simple Motions