Crayon Physics Deluxe out on Weds

And we're back! And so's Petri Purho, the one-man developer band composing potential PC darling Crayon Physics Deluxe, who has announced that it will be released on Wednesday, 7th January.

The full game - winner of the Independent Games Festival Grand Prize in 2008 - will be available for USD 19.95 from crayonphysics.com, and pre-ordering may still grant you access to a more-or-less complete beta version. That was the plan last time we checked.

Crayon Physics Deluxe tasks you with manoeuvring a ball across a single screen to a star, but your only effective tool for doing so is your mouse, which allows you to draw objects to life: circles, squares, wedges, or anything in-between. We can't do straight lines either.

You can also create fixed points, string and other helpful titbits, which go toward creating primitive gizmos like weighted lifts, catapults and - yes - contraptions more evocative than most of the late Rube Goldberg.

As well as more than 80 levels, the full game also launches with a level editor, which allows you to build your own scenarios in-game and share them via the game's website, with designs stored as simple PNG image files. Cute.

Several of Crayon Physics' IGF contemporaries have gone on to achieve great success (most notably Audiosurf and World of Goo), and the free prototype version is charming enough to suggest it could do likewise, as was the IGF version we played last year.

However, if you want to find out for certain then you could do worse than hang about here tomorrow when we'll be (chortle) drawing our own conclusions.