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Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

Waking up, looking at your clock, and seeing that you’re late for work or class is one of the worst feelings in the world. In that heart-stopping instant, you feel your control over your life drop into your stomach, and all you can think about is how annoyed or mad or disappointed the people waiting on you are going to be. It’s an adrenaline-drenched nightmare of a moment in which you realize just how quickly you can put your pants on and brush your teeth, and as you bolt out the door to face your fate, you wonder why you can’t always get ready that quickly.

Gary, the hero of developer Noego’s Level 22, is caught in that situation, and the really bad news is that he’s been late to work so many times that if anyone sees him this morning, he will lose his job. So on top of the already stressful situation of being late, he has to sneak his way up to the 22nd floor without anyone seeing him.

That’s right: This is a stealth game about going to work. And it’s every bit as silly and fun as that sounds.

If you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned computer role-playing game but don’t want to go through the dark rites of hardware emulation, Gurk III is a welcome alternative.

Originally released exclusively on Google Play, the Gurk games are bare-bones RPG adventures that pit a small group of adventurers with generated stats against kobolds, goblins, and all sorts of cave-lurking baddies–kind of like the old DOS Shareware title Castle of the Winds.

Video games are all about solving problems and helping people. Sometimes, the problem is “too many monsters” and the people are the ones who made all those monsters in the first place.

So it is with Link the Slug, a puzzle game from developer OX Play, which is about a hapless scientist who accidentally creates a new species of colorful slugs and immediately decides that they must all die horribly. And that’s where you come in.

To destroy the slugs — who I will remind you have done nothing wrong — you must “link” them by tapping on two slugs of the same color. This will cause electricity to arc between the two targets, killing them both. Electricity can turn either left or right once so you want to link slugs around corners, but it can’t pass through obstacles or other slugs.

Everyone loves feeding cute little animals, and mobile-game developers are no different. Games like Cut the Rope and Cat on a Diet are all about bringing food to adorable, tiny faces, and Drop That Candy continues the tradition.

In this colorful puzzle game, you are tasked with clearing all of the candy in a series of boxes in order to drop them into the waiting mouth of Gizmo, a woodland creature of indeterminate species. You do this by tapping on the candy, and you can clear multiple pieces of the same color with a single tap if they are touching.

It’s an odd setup, but it all adds up to a game that is equally cute, clever, and fun.

You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.

You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.

And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.

Well … it’s alright.

The Bitizens are back, and this time, it’s all about trains! Who doesn’t like trains?

Fresh off their hit Snake re-imagining Nimble Quest, NimbleBit has turned in a lovely little game that looks and plays a lot like last year’s hit Pocket Planes, with retro pixel art style and transit-themed, schedule-based gameplay. There’s a lot to like in this new iteration, as well, including streamlined mechanics, refined strategies, and updated graphics.

Let’s take a look.

The endless runner genre might be in a bit of a rut. You run, run some more, kick that thing, avoid that other thing, jump over that third thing … it’s all getting a little predictable.

Luckily, we have games like Boson X to mix things up a bit. Its developer bills it as a “rotational runner,” and it takes an interesting approach to adding to the genre: subtraction. Boson X doesn’t add new features like lasers or parkour like, for example, Runbot; it’s actually very minimal. And therein lies its strength.

Strata, a puzzle game by developer Graveck, has been out for a few months now, but I only recently stumbled across it. Like FlowDoku, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, it’s a deceptively clever title that uses a couple quick rules to create complex tasks for players to solve.

The rules of Strata are simple: You receive a square grid between 2×2 and 6×6 boxes in size, and you have to place colored ribbons across every row and column. Some boxes have colored squares in them, and the top ribbon on that square must be the same color. That sounds way more complicated than it is, but it makes sense once you’re looking at it.

And you should look at it because it’s really, really pretty.

You know how it goes: You’re the king, you have prestige and power and piles of riches all around you … and then some goblin shows up and steals your pants.

Alright, maybe none of that has ever happened to me, ever, but it is the premise of Trouserheart, a new hack-and-slash action game out today by developer 10tons (makers of the Joining Hands puzzle series).

Given the “epic quest to rescue kidnapped pants” premise, you’d expect Trouserheart to be a pretty light affair. And it is, but it’s also a solid, satisfying experience.

The idea of being a martial-arts master has always sounded cool to me. But not the Zen-like, pensive, thoughtful type. If I’m honest, I’d really just kinda like to be the guy in the movies who can walk into a room full of generic dudes and beat them all up while they attack him one at a time. And I’m not particularly proud of that, but I challenge you to picture yourself doing it and not once think, “Yeah, that would be pretty neat.”

But one thing is standing between me and that dream. Alright, maybe a few more than one, but one major thing: I am completely uncoordinated. I don’t have the balance or grace to execute any of the amazing fighting maneuvers I see in movies, and so I watch them with a sad sort of wistfulness and self-disappointment. And this feeling extends to video games, in which physics and animations unbound by natural law allow for inhuman feats of martial prowess about which my clumsy limbs can only dream. If limbs dream, I guess.

Anyway, Dragon Finga, the recently released fighter by developer Another Place, did not inspire those feelings of inadequacy in me because it contains the least graceful fighting system I’ve ever seen.

And that’s a good thing.

I really expected better of Disney.

A company that famous for creating, maintaining, and promoting franchises really should have known better than to end the first game of an almost guaranteed series with a question mark. So then the sequel comes around, and it’s called Where’s My Water? 2. Look at that 2. It’s just stuck out there alone, looking all awkward. I really feel bad for the little guy. I don’t know why Disney didn’t just call this game something like, Seriously, Where’s My Water?. Total missed opportunity to raise the stakes.

Oh, the game? Yeah, it’s pretty good.

I’m going to come clean on something: I really hate Sudoku.

I don’t know what it is about it; maybe it’s because it’s supplanted my beloved crossword as the go-to newspaper puzzle. Maybe it’s because I suspect that one could throw logic aside and accidentally solve it, possibly while drinking. Or maybe it’s just because it’s popular, and my Grinch heart is two sizes too small.

Whatever the reason, my heart or my booze, I’m not a fan. So I didn’t really expect to like FlowDoku, a shape-focused version of my puzzle nemesis by developer Hapafive. Turns out I was wrong, and I learned a very important lesson about prejudice.

I’ve played as a lot of things in my gaming career. I’ve been vampires, I’ve been space marines, and there was even a brief time back in 1993 where I was a walking circle with sunglasses. I’ve never played as a rock, though, so developer PikPok’s latest offering, Giant Boulder of Death, intrigued me right away.

The makers of the Erasure-loving endless runner Robot Unicorn Attack series have moved the camera around to the back to create an “endless roller” of sorts in which players control a giant boulder on a mission of revenge.

The plot — yes, there is one — is that the denizens of the village below the boulder’s mountain have stolen his girlfriend (a slightly smaller boulder with a bow) and used “her” to make a statue of their local military hero. Boulder immediately swears vendetta, freeing himself from the mountaintop on which he is precariously perched and setting off on a rampage of rolling crushery.

It’s pretty much as fun as it sounds.

One of my favorite things ever is Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast based on H.G. Wells’ Martian-invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. If you’ve never heard it and have a free hour, here’s a link. Just come back when you’re done.

Codename Cygnus is an interactive radio drama from developer Reactive Studios. And if you liked the storytelling, acting, and music in Welles’ production, it’s for you. If you thought it was cheesy and overly dramatic, you should try Cygnus anyway. Here’s why.

Ever play Lemmings? If so, you know the thrill of guiding little figures through ever-increasingly hazardous environments, using each character’s unique skill to avoid and overcome the devious level designer’s clever traps and obstacles.

Wobbles, a new universal game app from developer Play Nimbus, takes its cue from Lemmings in two ways. One, players need to guide their wobbles from start to finish, as they all follow each other in unvarying obedience to the march. Two, the little sounds the Wobbles make come close to the cuteness of the sounds in Lemmings–when players fail a level, an adorable Wobble voice says, “wobble wobble wobble!” It’s adorable. Seriously.

If you’re tired of running through temples, taking joyrides on jetpacks, or robot unicorn … attacking, developer Bravo has a guy you should meet.

He’s RunBot, star of the same-named, free-to-play, sprint-forever game out now for iOS devices. I’m not actually sure that his name is RunBot, now that I think about it, but that’s as good a name as any considering he’s a robot that runs. He also jumps, slides, falls, and flies, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Is your iPhone’s screen shamefully free of smudges? Do you want to test your memory, spatial awareness, and patience simultaneously? Do you love chalk?

If your answer to any of the previous questions was anything above “Yeah, I guess,” then you might want to check out publisher Chillingo’s puzzle offering, The Impossible Line. It’s out now, it works on your iPhone or iPad, and it does one thing really well: make you swear at a tiny triangle.

The Peablins are back.

The Peablins, for those not in the know, are the stars of 10tons’ hit iOS game, Joining Hands, a cute little puzzler that challenged players to connect a bunch of cute, gentle creatures across a variety of landscapes and levels.

The sequel takes the warmth and cute-factor of the first game and just knocks it out of the park. It helps that Joining Hands 2 is also a pretty fantastic little puzzle game, too.

Let’s be clear: I love tower defense games. I’ve been a fan since the first time I played Desktop Tower Defense on Kongregate, I fell hard for Gem Keeper and Fieldrunners, and I carry a torch for Kingdom Rush.

These are tough waters to compete in, especially with a free-to-play business model that needs to encourage players to spend real money to help fund the game itself. There’s a delicate balance in tower defense games, between too easy and too difficult.

Does Super Hippo Studios Limited’s Pirate Legends TD bring enough to the table, then, to stand next to these others?