Isoland

Thanks to an endless parade of difficult picture puzzles, this challenging adventure game is -- depending on your disposition -- a marvelous intellectual challenge or an exercise in frustration. Driven by beautiful images that recall the dark art of the original Addams Family cartoons and Tim Burton's movies, Isoland is a puzzling adventure game in the vein of Myst. What makes this especially clever (or frustrating, as the case may be) is how it sometimes messes with convention by, say, not giving you the knob to a drawer until you (spoiler alert) poke a plant three times. Then again, with the game using classic point-and-click controls, you'll probably end up (spoiler alert) poking that plant three times anyway. It also throws you for a loop by sometimes giving you the answer ... provided that you go back a couple steps and ask the right person. Which is why, in a perseverant puzzler's hands, Isoland will give players a really good run for their money.