Best of 2012 (Top 5):
The Room is a thoroughly intriguing, point-and-click style 3D puzzle adventure centered around a single box that is built on immense imagination. The sheer wealth of puzzles contained within will hold you engaged for hours. Beautiful visuals and clever puzzles invite continued exploration and discovery. Besides the large amount of entertainment it contains, The Room has the happy side effect of making you feel fortunate to possess the means to play it.
HUEBRIX, a logic-based puzzle game by Yellow Monkey, wants your brain. Not in a zombie-eating kind of way, but in a cool, challenging way. Similar to games like PathPix and Link-a-Pix (or a number of other Conceptis releases), HUEBRIX challenges you to fill out a grid of squares by dragging "color snakes" around the board. All of this happens on a timer, so you've got to be smart, you've got to be fast, and it wouldn't hurt to have a positronic brain, either.
Grooh is happygrr! Grooh is also the star of the lovely puzzle adventure Grooh, a tile-based isometric puzzle game that's all about destroying the very floor you walk on. Not only does it provide an ample number of challenging levels to complete, it looks and sounds like a cheery cartoon show, which will make you even more inclined to play it through to the end!
Surprise! Bust-a-Move (or Puzzle Bobble, if you will) is creative and fresh and fun again! Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team's Supermagical takes the familiar matching-based marble popping puzzle formula, quite literally turns it on its side, then adds a smattering of level-based progression, item upgrades, shops, mini-games, and even a hidden object diversion. The result is a colorful and charismatic game that feels like a brand new experience, no matter how familiar the gameplay might be.
Bushes and huts, grass and trees, churches and gravestones, and bears. Dangerous, dangerous bears. Triple Town from Spry Fox is the kind of mobile game you'll love to carry around with you at all times, firing it up for a few quick rounds and putting it away when you're satisfied with your progress. It combines city building with a good ole match-3 puzzle game in a manner you're probably not used to seeing, allowing you to work with individual elements to build a great empire, one match at a time.
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