World of Goo!

This ones for all you engineers out there who miss your LEGO, and anyone who loved Lemmings (the game) or the Incredible Machine series (I'm lookin at you Mouse)... but also for the non-engineers who just like sticking stuff together.

World of Goo is a game about cute little balls of goo. You can grab them and bounce them and fling them around, and if you drop them close enough together they form little goo-bridges between each other, and you can build things. There are different kinds of goo: some can be unstuck again, some are flammable, some float like balloons; there are even undead zombie goo. They come when you whistle for them.

The game has a quirky sarcastic story, rendered in early Kindergarten Crayon Drawings of the Goth Kid. The levels are mostly not time-based, so its not a hand-eye coordination test like some of these puzzle-y games, and they're mostly pretty quick; you can pop a 3-4 minute level in here-and-there while waiting for the next batch of brew to boil, as I proved yesterday. There's a free demo which is sizeable - the first 20-25% of the game - and the full version costs $20 (all of which appears to go direct to the authors) and can be bought online. And best of all, theres a playground where you can go to just build stuff with all the goo-balls you have rescued from the levels so far.

Go forth! Get gooey!