As in so many things, you can’t judge a game at a glance. Pudding Monsters, for iOS, is cartoonish but feels like it might prove to be a complex puzzle game. It’s a variant on the “tilt maze,” in which objects, once they start moving in a particular direction, cannot stop until they hit something. Here the objects in question are globs of pudding with googly eyes. On each level, the various globs wish to be united into one big glob, and they’re relying on you to help them. The game’s sole mechanic is a simple flick of the finger, which sends the pudding monsters sliding this way and that. The mazes are not terribly challenging, however, even given the little curveballs the game designers throw your way, like pudding monsters that cannot be moved until they are woken up, or gooey monsters that leave behind a trail of sticky slime. A determined solver can easily burn through the game’s 75 levels in a day — the three challenge levels you then unlock may take a little longer. Still, for .99, this is a fun diversion, especially for puzzle-loving kids, and like many iOS games, we can assume that additional levels will soon be available.
Hundreds, on the other hand, looks at first like it’s going to be dead simple. The first level is little more than a joke: You touch a circle with a zero in it. It turns red and grows until the number within it hits 100. Ta da! You win!
Savor that victory. On that first level, there’s only the one circle, so there’s no way to go wrong. On subsequent levels, if the circle touches anything when it’s red and growing, that’s it: Instant death. With that intriguing, original idea established, the game designers ramp up the difficulty, crowding the screen with bubbles, spinning blades, immovable blocks, and who knows what else — I’m only about halfway through the game. Getting the circles to add up to 100 soon becomes a serious challenge, and also a thoroughly addictive one.
PuzzCulture 