Bamboozle: Puzzle Game for the soul

I typically try and stay a safe distance from puzzle games. In 1985, a judge signed a restraining order that forced Word Find puzzles to stay at least 500 yards away from me at all times. Even then, at 3am, you might have found me with a flashlight, tenting underneath my Star Wars print bed sheets, circling and scanning, circling and scanning.

When the internet came along, life seemed easier. I could let my pencil callous fade, and the graphite under my nails didn't seem so bad any more. But something changed: No longer would you find me in the corner of the room, curled up in front of a good crossword or (god forbid) a logic puzzle. Now, instead, I was spending hours in front of a Tetris game, starving in lieu of leaving my java-driven Paint By Numbers puzzle, or diving into the morass of sin that is the Yahoo or MSN games portal.

I seemed free for many years then, as I moved on to more interactive games, and actually rediscovered life among other humans. I felt like someone who'd gone through an AA program: I still wanted, somewhere inside, to pick up the latest Puzzle Magazine at the local variety store, but my self control permitted me to live my life without feeding my habit. Occasionally, my fingers would twitch, perhaps in some echo of the twirling and fiddling with which I would punish my #2 pencil while I concentrated on some mind-twister.

And then came Bamboozle

You remember those games at the toy store, where a bunch of plastic toys were lined up horizontal and vertical in a square box, and it was your job to arrange them in such a way that the key piece could travel in a straight line from beginning to finish? The horizontal pieces could only move within their row, and the vertical pieces could only move within their column. It wasn't too difficult to beat the game, and if you got really frustrated with a configuration, you'd just bend the square in such a way that the cheap pieces just popped out, and you could move them wherever you wanted. Of course, the game never quite worked the same way again, but at least you won that one, damn it.

So, picture that same concept, but where the pieces are all some thematic element related to a series of these games. You can no longer just pop the pieces out, and instead of a leisure swapping of pieces until you happen upon the solution, you have to pay attention to the timer and the move counter. Now, picture a series of these puzzles arranged in levels of difficulty, and call it a Quest. Each Quest resembles some aspect of an Indiana Jones movie (i.e. jungle traversal, crypt traversal, etc). Picture all of that, and you have Bamboozle.

The game is small, runs innocently in a window on your screen (PC Windows), and takes up little to no processor time. It comes with a musical score, and sound effects for piece movement that are appropriate to the quest (i.e. moving large stones around in a tomb, etc).

In all, it's the perfect heroin.

Because of the low resource pull, I can sit it in the back of all my other windows, and when I want to pull out of my work and give my head a breather, I just bring it to the foreground, and run a few puzzles. If I'm not looking for much of a challenge, I can rerun the easy difficulty games, trying to beat older times and moves numbers.

The only criticism I have of the game is the lack of bragging rights. There are no high score lists that I can see, and no communication back to the website to create a central store of scores. I'd love to be able to share my best times and moves to the world. At the moment, the best I can do is brag with numbers that may or may not be fabricated. That's like explaining last night's dream to someone (potentially the most useless activity known to man).

Conclusion

Don't download Bamboozle. Don't install it. And, for god's sake, don't pay the reasonable $19.95 Littleshineyobjects.com is charging to unlock all of the quests in the game. If you don't follow my advice, the most you can hope for is occasionally getting up from your computer when your bladder requires attention. Of course, you could reduce that with a catheter and a complete and utter lack of nourishment, but you didn't hear that from me.

Check out our Bamboozle Image Gallery as well as the recent announcement for the release of Bamboozle for the Windows platform for more information.