Download Games Roundup

BlindGiRl

• Developer: GLPeas
• Format: Xbox Live Indie Games
• Price: 80 Microsoft Points (£0.64)

This thoroughly sinister maze game has you guiding the titular BlindGiRl through a world of darkness on the way to finding musical notes. It's less Pac-Man, more Alone In The Dark, with added misery and chilling paranoia.

Unable to physically see your surroundings, you're forced to rely on your sensory understanding of soundwaves and the way they propagate your environment.

Represented by a pair of footprints, you walk around in search of clues to direct you to the next note, and can 'see' the walls around you via the red soundwaves which ripple around the walls with greater velocity and amplitude depending on how fast you walk.

As tremendously unusual as the play mechanics are at first, navigation quickly becomes intuitive as you pace the darkened corridors in search of clues, while avoiding the attention of lurking beasts. Attracted by the sound of your footsteps, you learn to tentatively lure them out before giving them the slip with graceful tip-toeing silence.

Collecting notes eventually has gameplay implications, allowing you to play back the song and fill the world with green soundwaves, revealing otherwise hidden waypoints which help guide you through the correct exit.

With its unnerving atmosphere, stylish minimalism and unique premise, BlindGiRl is another sterling example of why the Indie Channel is proving to be a fertile arena for artistic expression.

8/10

Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures

• Developer: Mastertronic / Airplay
• Format: DSiWare
• Price: 800 DSi Points (£7.20 / €8)

Despite the colossal presence of the iPhone's App Store, Nintendo doesn't appear to have quite cottoned on to the pricing system that has made its rival so unstoppable. Available via the DSiWare shop for a princely 800 Points, Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures is unavoidably hamstrung for being so highly priced.

And that's a shame, because it's actually an absorbing, addictive puzzle game despite its ill-advised name, gaudy Amiga-era visuals, curiously lengthy load times and amateurish presentation.

You play as a somewhat insatiable chameleon named Leon, whose passion for fruit evidently knows no bounds. Your sole aim is to manoeuvre your way around, flick your tongue out and gobble up as much as you can before you head for the exit.

Being a particularly picky sort, he only likes to eat fruit that matches his skin colour and then changes to whatever the colour its leaves are. Plotting a course around each level also involves careful navigation, with Leon able to haul himself across gaps with his prehensile tongue, but unable to reach fruit below him.

Some fruit also requires you to enlist the help of baby chameleons, so the puzzle mechanics quickly become pleasingly convoluted as you wrestle with the addictive trial-and-error nature of the gameplay. With a rewind button included, mistakes are easily rectified and it's a real pleasure to play.

If you can ignore the much cheaper, vastly better-looking iPhone version (Super Yum Yum 3), then this is undoubtedly one of the best puzzle titles on DSiWare.

8/10

The Impossible Game

• Developer: FlukeDude
• Format: Xbox Live Indie Games
• Price: 80 Microsoft Points (£0.64)

If at first you don't succeed, sit there like an obsessed maniac trying over and over again until the blood vessels pop out of your temple and start freestyle swearing in frazzled protest.

Like the OCD platformer Canabalt, The Impossible Game positively goads you with its hostility. Designed in as minimalist a fashion as possible, this deceptively benign side-scroller puts you in control of a simple orange square with the task of safely traversing a landscape populated with black squares and triangles.

Played out to an aural backdrop of insistent electronica, timing is everything in a game where the only thing to focus on is when to stab the jump button. Swept along perpetually, the slightest mis-timing is enough to send you plummeting to your doom - and right back to the very beginning.

It's monumentally frustrating, but also bafflingly addictive as you continually try to make precious progress. Despite the entire game only lasting about 90 seconds, even managing the first 30 seconds feels like a monumental feat. Give it a try and see how long your sanity lasts.

6/10