It’s the first day back from the weekend, so we’ve got a triad of puzzlers to help warm up your overly relaxed weekend brain to get ready for the work week. Rooms: The Main Building starts things off by being a little bit weird, asking you to actually move rooms to create a path for a man stuck in a strange alternate dimension (apparently). Then there’s the Rubik’s cube-like Cubetastic, which claims to be the hardest thing you’ve ever played; and Lyst, a game that kind of emulates chemistry, complete with explosions. Check out all three below.
Rooms: The Main Building (iPhone, iPad) $5.99
An award-winning puzzler that took the student category of the Independent Games Festival in 2007, Rooms: The Main Building is a port of the game of the same name on the Nintendo Wii. It features the story of a man named Chris who is trapped in a world that consists only of rooms. To win the game, you have to complete various puzzles as well as slide the different rooms into the correct order to allow Chris to escape.
Rooms contains 80 different stages, as well as a time limited mode and a challenge mode that are both unlocked once you’ve finished the game. Rooms also has support from Games Center, which provides leaderboards and achievements.
Cubetastic (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
According to Cubetastic’s developers, this puzzler could be the hardest game you’ve ever played. That’s a tall order, but with its Rubik’s cube-like design and 150 levels to work through, it might not be far from the truth. Your goal is to guide a light on top of the cube from one side to the other by creating a path. To do that, you need to rotate the different sections of the cube (just like the Rubik’s cube game) to line up the right cells in order.
Cubetastic has two different game modes to go with all its levels, and you’ll get the ability to skip hard stages to come back to them later, if you choose. There are also achievements to let you challenge yourself and others, cubes of varying sizes and power-up items that can change the way the game plays.
Lyst (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
Orbs of different color — Lyst’s “matter” — float around your screen in this puzzler, and it’s your job to blow them up to earn points. To do that, you need to mix the basic matter, which is black, with special orange and blue matter. But to really score a lot of points, you need to know the elements you’re working with by finding combinations, like two of the same colors that can form vacuums to make the matter more dense and therefore more explosive.
You’ll make combinations in two different game modes — “Arcade,” which has you racing the clock, and “Ash,” in which you fight to keep the matter from filling the screen like in games such as Tetris. Power-ups change the way things work even more. Lyst also supports the use of your iTunes library, either on its own or as a custom soundtrack, which can include the three original songs that come with the game.
