Denki Blocks!

Three brain-teasers, one shared magic — the knack of grabbing you for five minutes and not letting go for an hour. Denki Blocks! is the name hiding an honest logic game on the Game Boy Advance whose principle is to slide colored blocks around the playing field so they join up into the required shapes.

The trick is that you can't move one piece in isolation. When you push a block in one direction, all the other blocks of the same color move with it until they hit an obstacle. What looks at first like trivial shuffling thus becomes a spatial puzzle where you have to think ahead and reckon with each move affecting the whole group at once. This single elegant mechanic carries the entire game and offers surprising depth.

What's lovely about games of this kind is how gently they start and how imperceptibly they ramp up. The first levels teach you the rules in a moment, but later you catch yourself pondering over a single screen, mentally replaying sequences of moves in reverse. No stress from a countdown, just the pure joy of finding a solution — exactly the kind of relaxing yet clever gaming that shines best on a handheld.

Denki Blocks! belongs to the fine tradition of the British puzzle school that gave rise to a whole array of catchy brain-teasers. Visually the game is simple and clear, because it's not about effects here but about the idea and its hundreds of variations. It's precisely the quantity and inventiveness of the levels that separates a shallow time-filler from a full-fledged puzzle.

On the GBA, which teemed with puzzle games, Denki Blocks! holds its ground thanks to a clean, well-tuned mechanic and how considerately it leads the player from simple to properly tricky puzzles.

Why play: If you love logic games you can think over at your leisure, this is the ideal companion for the in-between moments — a simple rule, plenty of tricky levels, and a pleasant sense of accomplishment from every solved puzzle.