Gnog

This puzzler is charming and bizarre and a welcome video game intended more for chilling out than working out aggressions. Even when some levels prove frustrating, the relaxed music and soothing pace make it difficult to get truly annoyed. That being said, the fact that the game includes no tutorial or real directions and lets you go at your own pace is both good and plausibly bad. It's good because it allows you to dive right in and figure it all out for yourself. For example, one of the earliest stages where you have to sort out a giant monster's obsession with eating insects is incredibly disorienting at first, but it slowly starts to make its own certain sort of natural sense. That each stage walks you through a similar mental process and leaves you to it, though, can also be bad because sometimes literally you have no clue what to do, where to go, or what to poke around on when and why -- like a level where you're helping a robber and have to thwart a hacker, whose password is on-screen at all times but tricky to replicate for some reason.

Neither halves of that necessarily makes the game "bad" or "good," just slightly thornier than it appears based on its vivid color schemes and loose pacing. You can definitely expect to hit a wall sooner or later, which proves more aggravating when you have no other stages to go back to or are equally stuck on all the ones available to you. Still, the game is fun, it's definitely weird, and it's certainly unusual. The frustrations will dissipate and spur you on, encouraging you to persevere. Just expect that to take a while.