Achievements are tracked on the "Tree of Wisdom"
Back in October I told you about a little iPhone game called Trainyard, a perfect blend of simple rules and devilishly complex puzzles. Well, you’ve had some time to solve all of those, so I present you with another dizzying puzzle game to tickle your brain: Woozzle.
Don’t let the funny name and lush green leaves fool you — this is a serious mind-bender with some real challenges. The controls are elegantly simple: tap a container to rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise, slide a marble to launch it out of a container along the available path. Marbles enter the from the top, one at a time, and your job is to send them through the convoluted paths to their destinations.
Match up four marbles of the same color in a container to clear that container (which then flips over to its “natural wood” color), and clear all the containers on the board to pass the level.
Of course, if it were just that simple it would hardly be worth playing. As you progress through the 60 levels, Woozzle introduces new features: colored containers which can only be cleared with a particular color; one-way paths or flipping gates; paths that only allow one particular color to pass or exclude a particular color; painters which change the color of marbles as they enter. There are teleporters, color mixers, and even a few levels where entire sections of paths are covered by leaves so you can only follow the marble with careful observation.
A sampling of Woozzle levels. (Click to enlarge)
The colors in Woozzle are rich and eye-popping, and combined with the sound effects really gives the impression of marbles sliding around in wooden channels. There’s some music and chirping birds in the background to help you feel like you’re out in a jungle, but those can be turned off separately if you get tired of them. Each level has three ranks, depending on how quickly you can solve them, and fortunately you can skip past a few puzzles if you get really stuck. (Level 45, shown with all the leaves, has me completely stumped.)
If you like brain-teasers and logic puzzles (and particularly if you enjoyed Trainyard), give Woozzle a spin. There’s a version for iPhones and an HD iPad version (with a different set of puzzles), and free Lite versions (iPhone and iPad) as well. All of them are currently at a reduced price of $.99, so it’s a terrific price for a dazzlingly good game.
