Crayon Physics Deluxe (Windows, Mac)

CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE is a puzzle game set in a familiar, childlike environment of crumpled paper with crayon drawings. And yet, this juvenile environment houses a powerful physics engine that turns your scribblings into objects that have weight and mass. The game consists of 76 puzzles which all share the same goal: get the little red ball to roll over to the yellow star. Your cursor is a crayon and you can draw anything that you can imagine to solve the puzzle.

At first, solving a puzzle can be as simple as drawing a line between the ball and the star and clicking on the ball to get it to start rolling. But you will quickly learn how to draw objects that fall, as well as platforms and ramps. As you progress through the puzzles, new concepts are introduced through drawn instructions. In one, you will see a small round circular pushpin and dotted lines showing the outline of a mallet around the pin. When you connect the dotted lines, the mallet appears, rotates around the pin, and hits the ball so that it will roll over the star. The puzzles get more challenging by introducing the concepts of levers and pulleys.

For puzzle lovers, this is a fabulous game. Because this is an environment made up solely of paper and crayons, it is a comfortable environment in which children (and adults) can stretch their creative and scientific muscles. Its genius is that there is no right way to solve a puzzle -- it is all about how you use your creativity. The game also provides you with a way to create your own puzzle levels and then allows you to upload them to the Crayon Physics Playground for others to share. Uploaded puzzles can be rated by stars, similar to the user-created content found in Little Big Planet.

While your solutions are drawn on the screen by using a computer mouse, you don't have to be good at drawing to play this game. This is a game about exploring how the physics of this game environment will affect the objects you think to draw. What makes this game so good is that it encourages you to expand your thinking – if something doesn't work, figure out why and try something else. If you really get stuck, you can check out video solutions shared by others on YouTube.