The monsters, sorry, MONSTARS are at it again, and it's up to Death and his trusty array of lasers, bullets, and special abilities to put things right... one explosion at a time. This sequel to 2009's arcade arena shooter smash hit packs a visual upgrade in addition to more gameplay, bigger challenges, and all the monstars you can handle.

Sarah Northway's massively popular zombie survival simulation strategy game gets an update in time for its anniversary on its mobile platforms! With the threat of winter hanging over your head and even more secrets and endings to discover, there's more reason than ever to pick up one of the most addictive turn-based sims around... for the first time, or again and again.

Ozzie Mercado is certainly a one and only, and One Bubble is the latest in a string of quality simple idea puzzle games. Jumping and eliminating bubbles, with naturalistic backgrounds and soothing music makes for a zen office-toy feel, perfect for an afternoon de-stressing.

Explore this room of bears (kuma) and mushrooms (kinoko) to find clues and solve puzzles, all in pursuit of getting out. This is quintessential Robamimi: seamless navigation, an intuitive inventory, and all the helpful features you could wish for in an escape-the-room game. So escape into the lovely, subtle magic of Robamimi's world; the only disappointment is having to leave.

In this episode of Libertechno's escape game series, you're locked inside a small, studio apartment and need to gather an abundance of clues—colorful pieces of Legos, among other things—overlooking a fair amount of misdirection to solve the puzzles that will elicit your key to freedom. A changing cursor is a good friend in this situation, especially as certain items utilize tone-on-tone color camouflage to avoid detection. A generous portion of exploration and code breaking make our escape feel well-deserved in the end.

Sakura Quick Math from Shiny Things sounds like it's one step away from being an extended homework assignment. But thanks to its stylish and simple design, it turns into a brain teaser that's way more fun than you might expect, and it might just make you a little faster at basic arithmetic!

Though not particularly deep, this top-down arcade action game is definitely polished. Unleash devastating magical spells and blast your way up through a tower filled with tons of monsters and massive bosses, snatching coins to purchase upgrades and new abilities with along the way.

A door, firmly locked. But have you got what it takes to escape? 40 times... 40xEscape is an entry into our 10th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, with the theme of "Escape", that placed 5th by our community of judges. It is what it is: a quality time-waster from a quality designer, and a CGDC #10 crowd-pleaser as all of Barts games tend to be.

When a low demon on the infernal totem pole trips and accidentally shatters an urn full of souls, he's got to track them all down or risk some pretty serious punishment. What follows it a vibrant, gorgeous, but challenging puzzle platforming title that packs a lot of character into its design.

Pixel Rain is a physics-based puzzle game from Silicon Studio. Taking the look and feel of a classic handheld LDC gaming system (come on, you know you've at least seen them on the internet), you are handed several dozen levels and challenged to drop gems and coins onto the playing field so that they're protected from the rain of dangerous pixels above. Sounds easy, but the level design means you'll be doing everything from quick-drop ramp stages to precise placement of blocks on a sparse screen.

Empty White Room has a theme, and what a theme it is. The game begins in an empty, almost featureless white room. There is no furniture, no windows, no doors to be had... but there is a surprising amount of complexity. Enjoy this short yet mind-blowing mini room escape!

Hey, you there! You blocked my pixel in with your car. Wanna back up so I can get this thing outta here? What's that? You can't back up? Fine, let's just restart the puzzle and try not to be so daft this time, shall we? So goes the conversation (or something like it) you'll have with your self over and over again with Pixel Blocked, a rotation-based block firing puzzle game that has cute and casual written all over it.

Challenging adventure wrapped up in an atmospheric and portable package is what we have been looking for, and what Glitch Games has delivered in spades. Immerse yourself into the world of Forever Lost Episode 1 and enjoy the escaping fun!

It's adventure time and ape time! Adventure Apes and the Mayan Mystery is a retro-inspired platform adventure from ScaryPotato that shares a few genre points with games like La-Mulana, Cave Story, and many other metroidvania games. As you quest about through the jungle, opening up new areas to explore as you find new tools and power-ups, you'll need to keep an eye out for coins, keys, treasure chests, and relics, all while dispatching common enemies and squaring off against more formidable boss foes. It's all action and adventure, and it's all good fun, from beginning to end!

I don't know, but I've been told! But Snake Squad, an action-packed arena shooter by Yzi Games, has just gone gold! There's not much of a story or depth to the gameplay, but it does have a bunch of viciously adorable looking soldiers snaking their way around blasting enemies and collecting cash, and it makes for a fast-paced good time.

Probability 0 is a procedurally-generated arcade platform game created by Droqen that's all about working your way down. Most games make it pretty easy to move in that direction, as we tend to think of up as the win direction (just ask any tall person) and down as, well, not-win. With this moody little game, though, you'll have to fight your way to the bottom of the screen, squeezing through blocks, punching holes in the terrain, dealing with evil enemies, and upgrading your abilities at every opportunity you get.

Of Light & Shadow is a puzzle platform hybrid from 12 Angry Devs that focuses on two characters, each with different abilities as well as environmental weaknesses. It takes place in a crumbling world of chaos, with giant frogs, chomping machine monsters, flying platforms and bubbling pools of lava all waiting to take a piece of you with them to oblivion. But, since you're such a talented player, you can survive the surreal stages and work your way to safety at the end!

Franken-Stitch has lost his head in this physics puzzle game available for your mobile device or as a computer download. Tap your way through obstacle courses of pulleys, trampolines, fans and more to reunite him with his happy little noggin. Use realistic physics and interactive objects on numerous challenging levels spanning multiple themed chapters.

Enjoy Detarou's usual surrealistic nightmare as you try to escape from indifferent gymnasts, strange men in turtle costumes, and one of the grosser sights you might see in any room escape game. Just, you know, don't be creeped out by the living Dharma doll who not only watches but physically seems to follow your every move.

Orange you glad I didn't say banana? Mostly because bananas aren't the stars of this charming physics puzzler! Manipulate gravity and your environment to collect fruits and get your orange to safety. Colourful and clever, if a little buggy on a certain stage, and certainly a lot of fun to boot.

From 10tons, the heavy-hitting creator of some of our favorite match-3 puzzle games, including Azkend 2: The World Beneath, comes a game about destroying the entire world, one rock at a time. King Oddball is a physics arcade game that plays as sort of an upside-down Crush the Castle or Angry Birds, challenging you fling rocks from the King's tongue so you can cause as much destruction as possible. If that doesn't sound like it's enough fun, factor in the eccentric, internet-approved sense of humor and fantastic visual style and you've got a game you'll have to force yourself to put down.

Save the world in this retro-fashioned Zelda-like adventure game with tons of enemies, weapons, quests, level up system, and a huge world to explore! Customize the keyboard commands as well as your character's stats to suit your playing style and hack-and-slash your way through the nostalgically detailed, 16-bit environment.

What would you go through for a ton of carrots? Jack Tube, the armless white rabbit from the Begamer game fo the same name, would gladly traverse 13 levels of puzzle platforming madness... with the help of your clicking finger, of course. Although the control scheme and some of the gimmicks in later levels make it clear that Begamer isn't doing a perfect job of disguising its usual point-and-clickery, and it's not exactly a difficult game, this is definitely a clever and interesting departure from the formula-- and if that doesn't grip you, the charming visuals and audio most likely will.

It's Pokemon for mobile devices! Ok, not quite, but the latest release from Game Dev Story and Kairobotica developer Kairosoft has certainly been looking at the monster training RPG for inspiration. Beastie Bay takes the familiar Kairosoft set-up and leans it more towards role playing territory, confining simulation elements to a smaller portion of the game while exploration, turn-based battling, and monster management take center stage.

As an investigation goes horribly wrong, William and Thomas must run for their lives. This CGDC #10 fourth-place finishing entry is a classic style point-and-click adventure game. Escape through the mansion before the monster catches up to you. Can you help the investigators escape before it's too late?

It's time to prove that you're the most lovable rogue in the city! Rogue Soul is a jump and run action game by Soul game studio that puts you in a free-running paradise. Unlike many of the genre, Rogue Soul has the flow down perfectly, making for a game that will make players feel unstoppable.

Take a resort vacation in Thailand in this relaxing and peaceful escape-the-room game from Cabeza. A clean design makes navigation straight forward: point and click around the room finding useful clues and objects. After solving a few logical, affable puzzles, you'll have the exit key in hand and a slide show of your vacation memories to enjoy.

It's a vision of the future we've all considered at one time or another: zombies have taken over the world, and the only way we can get to safety is to drive beat-up old vehicles across the barren landscape, splatting undead walkers as we floor it until we're out of gas. Earn to Die lets us play out that inevitable reality in the safety of our own mobile devices, dropping you in a desert and giving you a hefty garage of upgrades and the ability to earn cash by running into the wilderness and stunt driving as far as you can over and over again. Despite being a teensy bit repetitive, Earn to Die has that lovely ability to keep us hooked, probably because we get to crush zombies with sawblades attached to our bumper.

Ready... set... KABOOM! KragSoft delivers a lovely and engaging little chain-reaction arcade game that involves placing bombs to clear the screen. The catch? All those little icons you see drifting around explode in different ways, and figuring that out AND how best to use them is part of the strategy. A simple idea with a clean presentation that makes for an engaging little snack of a game rather than a main course.

There has been a crucial time fault. But you can escape the cycle. The Freewill Cycle: Volume II is an entry into our 10th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, with the theme of "Escape", and our community of judges awarded it with the 3rd place prize. It is the kind of innovative game we at JiG hope for when running these competitions, and it well deserves its place near the top of the rankings.

The princess has been captured! What do you do? Ride off on your majestic steed? Race to the castle in a carriage? Nope, you gotta bounce! Prince of Balls is an interesting platformer where leaping about and collecting all the goodies is the only way to travel. Getting to the end of each level can be tricky, but doing so with the fewest jumps to maximize your score makes this an easily replayable challenge.

You are a private eye investigating a rival P.I. when you are conked over the head from behind with a blunt object. Now you're trapped inside his office and must use your wits and detective skills to escape the room. Smooth navigation, a sleuthy ambiance and light parody of the genre make this a good, quick dose of noir whenever the mood grabs you.

Explore a world of tiny gardens, shady parks, and secret glades. Grow gardens and enjoy soothing sounds as you travel through this happy little block-fitting puzzle game from Michael Todd. Just click to pick up pieces, use space to rotate, and drag into place. Enchanting and sweet, Little Gardens has that bit of magic and heart that makes a good game a true delight to play.

What... the heck is going on here? At first glance, you probably think Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is some sort of Oregon Trail-related simulation game. But then you see words like "arcade game" and "side-scrolling shooter" and you suddenly think "Maybe I'm going insane? Maybe I've forgotten what words mean and I've just started seeing random flan horse topple red maneuver?". You can relax, however, as we're here to promise you that Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is everything the title suggests, and it manages to be fast-paced, crazy, and entertaining all within the first five seconds.

Tick tock on the clock, but the party won't stop, because Ozzie Mercado has just released Twelve O, another wonderful, simple idea puzzle game! Thinking rotationally can be mind twisting, and while the mouse controls can take a little getting used to, Twelve O makes for a great time-waster.

God of Blades is an endless running/combat game designed by White Whale Games. Instead of focusing on jumping around like a little grasshopper, you are given the ancient and epic powers of sword combat, dispatching foes by unleashing various swipes and abilities as you take on a stream of enemies who stand in your way. It's all about the artwork and aesthetic in God of Blades, and the development team absolutely nailed the look that will remind you of fantasy novels and prog rock album covers from the 1970s. Even if you weren't alive and kicking back then, everyone needs a little unabashed sword combat now and again!

Binga, Binga, ready your fingas! Ninja Doodle has just struck from the shadows with another in his awesome series of rapid-fire mouse-driven puzzle games. But just because these games are mini, don't expect them to be pushovers, especially since you're racinga the clock.

This Is Not An Escape approaches CGDC 10's "Escape" theme in a way both novel and familiar, and it makes for a mind-twist of an experience. Clearly this entry was a labor of love for its creator, and the result is something well worth watching, and well worth playing. This is Not an Escape is an entry into our 10th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, with the theme of "Escape", and our community of judges awarded it with the 2nd place prize.

Nitrome sends you on a tiny, puzzling adventure in this 50x50 turnbased game. Plot a course through a dangerous dungeon filled with tricks, traps, and baddies, nabbing coins along the way. It's a small (literally!) and thoughtful little game that will deliver a clever, bite-sized dose of puzzle action.

Take one color-coded multipurpose vehicle, add a variety of shapes scattered all about, then throw in the ability to mess with gravity in just about every way possible. The result? Colour Bind, a brand new physics-based indie puzzle game from Finn Morgan. Controlling a simple little car (two wheels on a chasis, basically), you have the pleasure of working through dozens of levels as you flip switches and change gravity so you can reach the exit. Best of all, Colour Bind was built with old school sensibilities in mind, meaning you'll be rewarded for exploration and challenged with difficult levels from beginning to end. Hooray!

Ready for a puzzle that will run you rug-ged? Farsh, from the Persian word for carpet, is a tile-walking puzzler where you've got to roll and unroll your carpet to reach the exit. If you roll up just right, you can rotate the tiles around you to build a path. Just don't let your mind get frayed in the process!

When martial arts and food combine, the result is something far more epic than that time you tried to slice through a cabbage in mid-air. Legend of Fat Ninja is a physics arcade game from Zephyr Games that tells the tale of Kureijita, the ninja chef who just graduated from the legendary Iron Skillet Academy. Along with fellow graduate and sidekick Kaminoha, he's out to prove he's the best chef in the land. All he needs are a few good recipes, and he knows just the food masters to take them from!

The continuing horrors from the casual adventure developer ERS Game Studios have returned, and this time it's more horrorey than ever. Haunted Halls: Revenge of Doctor Blackmore is the third game in the Haunted Halls series, picking up where the previous games left off and not stopping to let you gather your wits. It's a psychologically intense game for a point and click puzzle adventure, but it's carried out with the usual grace and flair we've come to expect from ERS. Ready to descend into madness again?

We've waited nearly 2 years for the next installment in Mateusz Skutnik's enigmatic Submachine series, but the wait is over. Submachine 8: The Plan is here at long last with more mysterious mechanical contraptions to figure out, more mysteries to be revealed, and maybe even some long overdue answers to questions that have been nagging at us since the last chapter. Portals within portals? This changes everything.

Mmm, delicious eggs. As we've learned from the Angry Birds series, round, legless piggies love nothing more than a good egg. And they'll do anything they can to get their snouts on one! In Rovio's latest physics game Bad Piggies, the tables are turned and you're working to help the pigs get what they want. Instead of slingshots and breakable forts, though, you're building rickety contraptions box by wooden box. It's a little bit of construction, a little bit of action, and a whole lot of crashing. Exactly what you need in a casual mobile game!

You are stuck inside a nightmare dream. Something lurks in the darkness... Something in the depths of your own mind wants to pull you even deeper. Someone will escape this dream for sure. The question is - who is that going to be? Deep Sleep is an entry into our 10th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, with the theme of "Escape", and our community of judges awarded it with the 1st place prize.

Love roguelikes but wish all that permadeath would lighten up a little? This fabulously retro and witty game might just be for you. Venture deep into dungeons and other areas populated by bizarre monsters and strange people as you quest towards one of four different endings and unlock a total of 20 classes. Offering a surprising amount of depth, laughs, and addictiveness, it's a great casual introduction to the roguelike genre, and a lot of fun for fans.

This escape game from Jan's Room is the kind of place where you'd want to hang out with your friends. While here, search through the Pool Bar for clues, enter codes, and even uncover the top secret VIP lounge. Pixel hunting detracts from the experience in a couple instances but not enough to ruin the fun. A pleasing number of puzzles, with just the right bit of challenge, makes being here enjoyable even while escaping feels well-earned.

A house, in a field, looking about as haunted as haunted can get. Why not step up and take a closer look? The Haunt is a mobile point and click puzzle game from Furious Apps that plays (and looks) like a casual adventure/hidden object game you might download to your desktop computer. Instead of a mouse and keyboard, though, you get to investigate a haunted house with your own two hands, finding items, managing your inventory, and solving mini-games while a paranormal presence follows you from room to room.

Death is out to do his job, and instead of going after cute things like bunnies or people who think aliens aren't real, he's hunting demons! And you get to help! This great little puzzle game from Pixelulsar uses the sliding block concept to craft 20 levels of smart planning, testing, executing, and the other kind of executing, all in the name of tossing demons into pits of lava. Neat!

Petithima is back with another mellow mini room escape to delight all of those who like logical, graceful puzzles. Mugcup makes the escaping go down smoothly. With an easy to use inventory, a mute feature, and a save feature, Petithima's games, although short, feature everything we like to see in a room escape.

Surprised to see Rayman in a place like this? Time to reconfigure your expectations, as our limbless hero is making a run for the casual mobile market. Quite literally, too! Rayman Jungle Run from Pastagames brings the platform star to a new genre that feels quite at home on the iOS screen: endless running. Instead of randomly generated drab worlds, though, you can expect some startlingly lush visuals paired with challenges and abilities that gradually evolve as you play. It's such a good jump and run game, you'll probably wonder why more titles haven't adopted a similar layout!

The latest in Toge Production's popular series of zombie action-strategy games, Infectonator 2 thrives on frenetic chain-reaction based gameplay, its awesome sprite art, and the pure adrenaline rush one gets by infecting the world, continent by continent. It may be a bit taxing on the CPU for such mindless fun, but that just means you'll keep going even after someone has taken a chomp from your brain

Pheus and Mor, a boy and his dog. Best friends forever, right? This puzzle platformer puts that to the test, combining stunning, dreamlike levels with ominous foreshadowing for a flawed but engaging experience. Both characters will have to work together and use their strengths to get to the end, but are they ready for what's waiting for them on the other side of that locked door?

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.

The shadows and your wits are the only things keeping you alive in this clever stealth-based physics puzzler. Navigate your way through a series of increasingly challenging (and deadly!) obstacle courses, avoiding lasers, turrets, and more, by figuring out how to use the environment, moving shadows, and even the light itself to your advantage. Originally a simple prototype back in 2010, Shadow Drifter shows how to expand on a much-loved concept and provide a polished, engaging finished project without losing anything from the original.

Your friend deserved a better end than this. Not at the end of the bottle of the tainted poison that the syndicate is trying to pass off as hooch. You may be just one man, but one man with a gun in his hand is often all you need to find some answers. Rot Gut is a action platform shooter by test84, set in a pixelated depiction of 1920's big city gangland. Gameplay is a little generic as shooters go, but it's solidly enjoyable and, more importantly, has atmosphere to spare.

With the success of music games on every platform, it was inevitable that iOS devices would see a few as well. While the range in quality is as variable as ever, Cytus from Rayark is on the high end of the scale. With clear, fantasy-futuristic graphics the game catches attention from the title screen simply by looking different, and gameplay doesn't disappoint either!

Explore the vegi-magical island of Geos in Lili, a quirky RPG adventure game for your iOS device. What starts out as an expedition to search out interesting flowers becomes much more as you get to know the island's inhabitants. The Constructs need outside help to break out from the iron rule of the Spirits. Will you stay to help your unusual new friends, or take the flowers and run?

In this cheery, silly RPG/simulation from maxmobile for iOS or Android, you're a pygmie hedgehog setting out on adventure and searching for friends. The vibrant presentation and simple, accessible gameplay makes this one addictive and fun despite its lack of depth, and something both kids and adults can find hard to put down.

Ah, the romance of the old west. Cowboys, cattle drives, the pony express... Also brush fires, coyotes, droughts, greedy land barons, and bandits who ransack towns and kidnap the population for ransom. It might not be as romantic as John Wayne movies would have us believe, but things were still pretty adventurous, a side of the times that Alawar chooses to represent in the time management adventure game The Golden Years: Way Out West.

Bigger, badder, and altogether better than the original, Runic Games' brings their action RPG back to life in this fantastically fun sequel. When old heroes fall and turn against the land as a sickness spreads across it, it falls to one lone wanderer to take up the mantle of hero. With multiplayer support, huge boss battles, sprawling environments, and new classes unrestricted by gender, Torchlight 2 is a sequel that delivers everything it promised and more.

A strange name for a strange game, Oh Hi! Octopi! is an arcade/puzzle release from the creator of 1-bit Ninja, kode80. Combining single-screen levels with matching-type gameplay and purposefully obtuse controls, it can be a maddening experience trying to learn to play the game, let alone actually accomplish something. But once you do, it's a great feeling, and you'll finally be able to say a hearty "hi" to those little octopi as you smash them with a hammer.

In this fourth installment of Blue Tea Games' darkly dramatic adventure hybrid series, you join a band of femme fatales, once victims in other fairytales, to fight against a power-warped villainess and her plague of mist wolves. Fragmented object search scenes, side quests for cursed items, and a nice offering of gently-challenging puzzles add to your immersion in this action-filled, and oft times violent, adventure.

An arcade avoidance game by Mortar Games that has you controlling a small. fragile virus, attacked on all sides by the defenses of the host body. The Fishy-styled gameplay little slow going at first, but the eerie atmosphere and a surprisingly affecting final level make Vivirion worth playing until the very end.

Escape from the Room with a Strong Door is the perfect equivalent of a bowl of beer nuts, an addicting little nibble that makes you hungry for more. The game is pretty stripped down, involving a stark room with the aforementioned strong door, one piece of furniture, a wastebasket, and two pictures on the wall. Try the latest salty snack from Hottategoya, a cute little bite-sized escape game that will leave you craving more.

Like alchemy games like Doodle God? Well, how about trying out the authorized remake of Christian Steinruecken's The Alchemy Game? For your beloved Android device, NIAsoft brings you Alchemy Classic. From a lowly four elements, combine your way to hundreds of them as your world becomes more complex and the game gets harder! If there were ever a game to make you feel stupid for forgetting the chemical formula of methane, this certainly is it. So if you're not afraid of a little chemistry, give this free game a try!

This is the story of the greatest band of all time... no, not Tenancious D... you! Heavily inspired mechanically by Game Dev Story, this musical simulation tasks you with handling the (hopefully) meteoric rise of a band of initially talentless musicians through the decades. Write songs, make albums, handle interviews and more as you strive to become legendary in an evolving industry. Also, make songs about farts, because everyone seems to love those. Speaking from experience here.

KintoGames serves up some challenging roguelike retro action in this squishy, slashy dungeon crawler. Battle your way through hordes of enemies, gain powerful weapons and armor, find power-ups, and try to stay alive... all with the click of a mouse. Some awkward controls keep it from really feeling as sleek as you'd like, but with a great sense of style and tons of baddies and bosses, it delivers a solid dose of arcade-style hack-and-slash action.

The ability to make theme and mood fit together into an elegant, peaceful escape-the-room game is perfectly illustrated by TomaTea here. Follow the glowing cursor to find clues and puzzle tiles and chess pieces. Then, use logical deductions and mathematical calculations to complete numerous doors and drawers until you find the exit key.

A topdown arena shooter by Daniel Twomey, Commit.5 is a game that's going to make it hard to stay in one place. As the little blue thingy in a world of other-colored thingies, you must survive as long as you can. By giving players an incentive to stand their ground for bonus points, Commit.5 has an arcadey-defense feel to it, which setting it apart from others of the genre.

In a world filled with people who want to live forever, a Watermelon headed person concocts the elixir of life. Much to his frustration a cross-eyed witch comes along and steals it! In this point-and-click game it's up to you to guide the Watermelon man and take back his claim to fame!

Chop! Chop! Chop! What's that sound? The sound of timber being harvested in Realore Studios' Adelantado Trilogy: Book One! The creators of games like All My Gods and Roads of Rome have done something special with this casual simulation/resource management game, adding some role playing elements and throwing in a good helping of originality. The Queen of Spain has appointed you, Don Diego De Leon, as adelantado of the new world, and it's up to you to find out what happened to previous expeditions that were sent out and never seen again. While you're there, find treasure to send back to fill the the country's coffers and best your rival Pablo Rodrigez to the gold and riches that surely rest in this unexplored land!

You've got a few minutes before you have to be at work. That means it's time for a game! But what to play, Pac-Man or a tower defense game? How about both? From Tametick, the creator of Cardinal Quest, comes Pakkuman's Defense, a surprisingly superb melding of the classic arcade game Pac-Man and a modern tower defense game. There are ghosts. There are dots to eat. There are towers to place. And yes, you're going to have a blast with this unusual hybrid!

The most whimsically beautiful golf game ever comes to the iPad in this port of JayIsGames' Best Physics Game of 2011, Wonderputt. The retina display on the new iPad showcases the stunning animations far beyond the browser version, but what'll keep you coming back is the natural touch controls and the challenge of completing the rainbow.

Gateways, an exploration-based platform game from Smudget Cat Games, can be quickly summarized by saying it's like Portal, but in 2D. That's leaving a lot out of the equation, though, as Gateways goes to great lengths to provide a different kind of experience, one more akin to a metroidvania-type game than that other portal-making adventure. You'll realize that as soon as you start to explore the chunky pixel laboratory, smashing the glass domes over monkey's heads and wondering how on Earth you're supposed to climb over the next ledge.

We've worked our way up 100 Floors, maybe opened a few DOOORS along the way. So... now what? How about turning on some lights in here? A new point-and-click mobile puzzle game from Smarcle (which isn't officially related to either of the games above), 100 Lights, is all about bringing some illumination to dark situations, challenging you to turn on the lights in each level. The best part is the solutions are never spelled out for you, and you'll have to shake, twist and swipe your screen to figure out how things work!

Pity the poor royal court of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. The exhausted souls just finished uniting Egypt in order to keep the gods happy and now they are faced with a new challenge: travel down the Nile and rebuild temples before the gods start getting all explodey on their butts. And all of this must be accomplished while the royal architect is severely under the weather and the royal cat has gone AWOL. Pharaoh Touti and company are back in BlooBuzz's (formerly Wendigo) latest time management strategy The Timebuilders: Pyramid Rising 2.

ScrumbleShip is an in-progress sandbox-style game of ship construction and combat simulation, all accomplished using a massive list of building materials and a surprisingly smart heat simulation model. Built around simple block placements, you have complete freedom of movement in this game, allowing you to jet yourself in any direction so you can construct the most accurate (or most hilariously inaccurate) piece of space-faring machinery you've ever seen. Want a tiny escape pod all your own? Done. How about a massive star base? Orbital station? Or maybe even a Death Sta— er, moon?!

Described as a "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" by its developers, Subset Games, you won't be doing a whole lot of boldly going where no one has gone before in FTL: Faster Than Light. In fact, most of your time will be spent directing crew members and putting out engine room fires. But scifi strategy fans will love every minute of it, even with the hardcore difficulty.

Your life was just a simple one. But this morning, you've found this sparking mechanical creature in your front yard. Is it friendly? Is it hostile? Or, perhaps scariest of all... are you teaching it what to do? A Ludum Dare 24 entry by Paul Greasley, Soul Jar is adventure platformer that tasks you with directing the evolution of a robot companion, for good or for bad. Visually stunning, with a killer premise, Soul Jar is hampered by clunky controls, but demonstrates the creativity the Ludum Dare format can inspire.

Being a detective for the Agency of Anomalies must require a good deal of patience and nerve. Patience because every door you encounter tends to be locked, and nerve because who would want to deal with secret Brotherhoods, strange powers, and unfamiliar terrain that could possibly be hiding a fiendish monster or two. In the third installment of the Agency of Anomalies series, Orneon sends its favorite detective to a theater filled with performers suffering the effects of special powers that are slowly turning them into creatures. Help find the leader of this rag tag band and reverse the transformation while avoiding the capture of the Seekers.

Cryptica, a sliding block puzzle game from Pixibots, is like being stuck in the trap-filled tomb of some pharaoh whose devious riddles were designed to keep you busy until the end of time. And, well, that's pretty much what it is, although according to the official backstory you're hunting for lost relics by solving puzzles in crypts. Either way, there's a lot of amazing challenge to be found in this game of symbol matching and stone sliding!

Point-and-click your way through a short list of complications to heroically rescue a damsel in distress. Using a touch of clever problem solving and item management, you'll soon reach the end of this creatively unassuming puzzle game. The blend of whimsical sketchwork and mild challenge ensures your left brain and right brain will be feeling quite pleased to have this meeting of the minds.

They say big things come in small packages, and you're one of the smallest around! But just because you start out on the bottom of the food chain doesn't mean you'll stay there, if you're fast on your feet, and with your teeth! A short, simple, and colourful action avoidance platformer themed around evolution and made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare.

Point-and-click your way through this modest escape-the-room game from Tateita, encountering a number of slightly sticky, never abstruse puzzles until you find the key to the exit door. It's short and easy enough to fit into those times when you're glued to your computer but want a nice escape to lighten your mood. Best yet, you won't end up with fingers stuck together or glue globs on your clothes.

A simple errand takes a turn for the surreal when our hero, forced away from the video game console and out of the house, stumbles down a hole into the middle of the earth where he is, of course, tasked with tracking down magical gems. The same thing happened to me the other day. A little bit retro, mixed with a healthy dose of metroidvania and high-difficulty platforming, and Kodachrome is a weird but appealing little challenge.

Play conductor and get the train cars to their proper stations in this railroad puzzle game. Drag the engines around the tracks to connect to the waiting cars. Push and pull them along the track, changing directions at junctions when needed, until you get all the cars lined up with their match. It may sound simple, but Railroad Shunting Puzzle will have you exercising your brain in no time.

Introducing a new-to-the-scene escape designer in this pleasant locked room venture from Libertechno. Those familiar with other, more well known escape games, will likely be making a lot of comparisons here which could leave you stumped when not everything is as it seems at first glance. Yet Aries Escape's puzzles are logically fair, with plenty of direct clues and a changeable cursor to keep the experience light and amusing. Can you open the door of code-filled café with both the normal and "happy" ends?

One of the greatest miracles in modern medicine is happening right before our eyes: Germs are finally learning to play by the rules! However, they follow those rules to a T (cell?), so you've got to figure out how to rearrange the germs in the Petri Lab, a rule-rearranging logic puzzler by Grace Avery. Transform the germs in the Petri dish to match the target at the top by activating the germs' specific rulesets.

It seems like just yesterday that the Georganisms collected all their weapons and fended off the attack to their fair isles. But there is no rest for the weary jelly blobs quite yet! The local volcano has erupted, and those colorful critters will once again have to literally pool (or at least smoosh) their talents to unsubmerge in Georganism 2 a puzzle platformer by Karma Team. Georganism 2 builds on the strengths of its predecessor, displaying puzzles that fans of the original should find challenging, but not so difficult that new players cannot jump right in.

Shards of light fall from the sky over a cold, lonely, frozen land, and it's up to you to reunite them... or remain alone yourself. A melancholy but absolutely gorgeous bit of platforming exploration married heavily to interactive art, the game is simple and straightforward but well worth experiencing to take in the creative talents of the team behind it.

You are wanted, you are obsessed over. Thus you are trapped in a room on the threat of death should you leave. Makes you feel kind of, um, icky all over, right? In this series of escape-the-room games for your mobile device, you must use lateral thinking, deduction and some general savviness to outwit your capture and find freedom.

REW 2 is a point-and-click puzzle game that is centered around reverse chronology. This time, our favorite little beaver-squirrel guy has apparently ended his day in front of a smoldering corpse. How did he get there? Well, that's for him to know, and you to find out.

Poor, helpless little... what are those again? Squished hippopotamus faces? Circle-blobs? Yeah, those. Poor helpless those. Actually, at least one of those circle-blobs has a name: Mayhem. And as you play this little genetically engineered experiment in OneSmartBunny's action/platform game Project: Mayhem, you'll begin to pity these critters more and more. But then you'll realize how tough this game is and start focusing on what really matters: landing jumps that require almost pixel-perfect execution, all without slowing down to see what you're doing. Good luck with that!

Three different people, three different worlds, and one very strange common thread. Tyler Glaiel, now part of Eyebrow Interactive, brings us one drop-dead gorgeous dark puzzle platformer in the form of this upgrade to his 2009 classic browser game full of ingenious levels and stunning design. Manipulate light to change your surroundings, using shadows to wipe away obstacles, and, ultimately, find your way back home.

Combining elements of exploration, puzzle solving, and some good old fashioned robot building, Mobiloid from Montrezina plays like the best parts of Metroid and Q.U.B.E. blended to perfection. It's a game that allows you to use almost two dozen accessories to create functional (or, you know, not so functional) contraptions that help you stick your nose in every corner of the world, uncovering new items, new parts, and new puzzles along the way.

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.

Auria Edith died, but for her it was just the beginning. When she finds herself resurrected and stranded on the other side of the world following a bargain she may regret making, things go from bad to worse. In this short but polished first installment of the free modern fantasy RPG by Project BC, Auria sets out to find her way home, but she might not be prepared for what comes looking for her instead.

Angelica "Dream" Weaver is used to being called in to use her "gift" to help the police when they're stuck, but even she isn't prepared for the bizarre chase this latest case will lead her on. A killer who seems to be dragging her back through time and enjoys his game of cat-and-mouse far too much to ever stop murdering will prove to be a challenge... and hopefully not one she can't overcome, since failure might be fatal in this gorgeous, cinematic hidden-object mystery adventure.