Try a puzzling indie PC game

Those of you interested in learning what Q Entertainment's PlayStation Portable puzzle game Lumines is all about might want to take a look at Caboodle, a shareware PC puzzle game that, er, owes a certain amount to the Japanese.

Developed by UK-based Indiepath, reading about it suggests a simple, relatively interesting twist on the old falling blocks genre. They drop in groups of four, you have to make squares or other shapes to eliminate them, there are a few power-ups and - hang on - there's also a little bar that starts to fill up when you've connected enough to make a square. This leaves you precious little time to add make it bigger or connect it to others. And there's an icon that, if used in a square, will eliminate all those same-coloured blocks attached to it. Hmm.

Indeed, it's incredibly similar - the only major differences to the core game being the way the bar fills up only when you've grouped squares, rather than roving along from side to side as it does in Lumines. The music and backgrounds obviously can't compete either.

On the whole though, it is much the same, and we doubt the Dorset-based dev would dispute that much. Whether you feel like paying $19.95 for the full version is up to you, but if you want to get an idea of how Lumines works, you could do worse than to try it. Just be aware that the PSP puzzle game, due out from Ubisoft on September 1st in Europe, is one of the best-structured, most organically grown puzzle experiences since Tetris, and this is just a reasonable facsimile.

And not even that reasonable. Rob reckons it's incredibly buggy. Oh well.