We're into playing whatever you guys think is cool, so we decided to give Towelfight 2 [$0.99] a shot after an awesome commenter (and Eli) suggested we do it. And you know what? It's an awesome game. It's sorta like an ultra light rogue-like mixed with a dual-stick shooter. In the game, you play as monocled-man swept up in a battle between gods. He's warped to a strange world with rabid animals and is tasked with getting out. Unfortunately, this world looks a lot like an old-school 2D dungeon and there's a lot of different ways to go and to approach things.

We're calling it "ultra light" because Towelfight isn't all that punishing. If you die, you go back to a warp spot, which is basically a checkpoint that makes your dude throw up. (Don't ask.) BUT, the rest of the game has some rogue-like sensibilities like, say, a huge grid-based map to explore and a pretty deep weapon system.

It's a little pricey as far as App Store games go, so if you'd like to give it a good long look (and watch us fail over and over again) check out the below:

Chillingo's position in the App Store has become somewhat of a double-edged sword. As a mega-publisher with a huge user base, getting signed to work with them can mean instant success for a smaller developer. Yet with the crazy flood of new releases, the blessing of brand recognition can just as easily be a curse. Hand-crafted standouts from talented studios risk being dismissed as "this week's Chillingo game," passed over by players and reviewers as they scour for something more 'unique.' Until a couple of days ago, I had typecast Room 8 Studio's Cyto [$0.99] as one to skip. While checking out our forums, though, it became clear that it had readers intrigued and impressed, wondering why there wasn't more being said. One non-stop play session later, I'm here to make amends.

Cyto puts you  in control of the world's cutest piece of cytoplasm (I think this may be the only time someone has ever written the words "cute" and "cytoplasm" in the same sentence). A smiling, blinking, blue amoeba missing its memories and desperately searching for its friends and family. As usual in the puzzle platform genre, it's all a thinly veiled excuse to fling, stick, and drop your way through a slew of bite-sized levels in an attempt to collect three tokens. In this case, glowing pieces of Cyto's past. Familiar mechanics are where the slippery slope to boredom ends, however.

Deftly avoiding the trap of lazy visuals, Room 8 delivers a vibrant and ominous little world. Static backgrounds filled with painterly orbs and tentacles dwarf your microscopic protagonist and allude to the body of something sinister. Meanwhile, the playing field is abuzz with life as microbes pulsate and motes of glowing particles spiral in all directions. It even seems like Cyto is reacting to it all with wide eyes, agape mouth, and looks of trepidation mid-flight. Tying the experience together is an evocative piano soundtrack; part nostalgic waltz, part funeral dirge, it'll have you taking the game's recommendation to use headphones seriously. Cyto tickles a lot of the same synapses as Chillingo cousin Contre Jour [$0.99 / $2.99], and the comparison goes further with the game's absorbing design.

It's a hallmark of too many three-star, one-screen platformers that I can barely remember one level from the next. They all mix together in a soup of vaguely rearranged obstacles and objectives that enter occupy my thoughts one second, and are gone the next. With Cyto, many of the game's 81 levels stick around after the score screen has faded. This is due in no small part to the surprising sense of choice that runs throughout the game. Instead of having essentially two ways to complete each level - the easy way, where you careen straight to the exit, or the substantial way involving collectibles - it's often apparent that you took one of a handful of paths to the level's glowing exit orb. The meticulous arrangement of the game's sticky surfaces, thorny obstacles, and precious open space allows for ample experimentation as you try to chart your course to the far corners of each level. I'd often finish with that wonderfully satisfying feeling that the way I played and beat the level had been a complete fluke; that only I had beaten it that way.

Cyto doesn't mollycoddle when it comes the difficulty curve, either. The back nine levels in each world deliver shades of the same cerebral thrill that made Portal so spectacular. Instead of slingshotting around, proverbial guns blazing, you'll have to digest portions of the level as you take yourself through the paces and consider cause and effect. When pulled off perfectly, the game becomes an opponent you outplayed in chess, conquered at the hands of your mental trapeze work. Easily the crowning jewel here is the game's "gold" levels, given out as sadistic rewards for perfecting the eight levels that came before. Each one caps off the mechanics of that section, and adds huge longevity to the game by sucking you into a brain-busting challenge that's best served when you have plenty of patience on hand.

Mechanically, Cyto is also a breath of fresh air. Sure it's got all the typical add-ons like wind, portals, and bouncing pads, but every new feature rolls out in such that each stage has a healthy mixture of what you've seen and what you haven't. Function even becomes form as new obstacles like multiplying spikes and fading memories throw a wrench in the game's measured pace and turn levels into tense races against the clock. The result is an experience that very much keeps you on your toes...perhaps too much so, in some cases. The game takes a noticeable hit by demanding extreme precision, but not delivering it in return. Shots that launch you onto a safe piece of grass during one try seem to bounce you off a wayward edge during another; detaching Cyto to roll down an edge to the exit will often send him tumbling the other way, all with little to explain why. Luckily, the game traces your last five shots with angled dots, making retries far less frustrating than they could be.

That's ultimately Cyto in a nutshell. With every opportunity it has, it proves that it's not lowest common denominator fare. This is one of the few in this genre with the promise of more levels "Coming Soon" which has me eagerly awaiting the update notification on my iPad. Rather than judge a book by its publisher, pick this up today: it'll be a delight for your left and right brain alike.

Editor Note: We've now got a second Eli writing for us.

This week's haul of new games had a lot of weird stuff in it, like Backflip Madness [$0.99]. I included it because there's a huge contingent of people who can't seem to get enough of these various physics games, and honestly, I didn't expect a whole lot from the game. When 11:00 Eastern rolled around, I downloaded it with everything else, and haven't been able to put it down since.

Here's the premise: Do a backflip, then another backflip, and another. That's it.

I'm big into getting the bad news first, so let's dive into why this game is terrible. First off, the physics are beyond janky. You'll mess up endlessly, yet somehow miraculously stick really weird landings that you have no business doing unless your shoes were coated with a liberal layer of super glue. The graphics aren't that great, background textures clearly repeat and your little backflipping dude has the animations of a simple paper doll. The music is repetitive, the UI is weirdly basic, and most of the in-game systems such as choosing different styles of backflips are remarkably unintuitive. Oh, and if you've got friends playing it, you'll get an endless stream of Game Center push alerts with their scores.

...Yet, I can't stop playing it. It's one of those games that are so bad, and so simple, that there's this endless feedback loop of "I should be able to do this, why am I failing, I KNOW I can do this," which leads to never giving up- Particularly as you start to see the proverbial Matrix, have a string of five perfect backflips in a row, then fall flat on your face.

Here's how it works: A single button in the bottom right corner handles all the action. The first time you hit it, your dude starts to kneel down. The second time you hit it he jumps up. The third time you hit it he crunches into a backflip position. The fourth time you hit it he extends his legs to land. That's it. The first jump in the first level has you just performing a backflip in place, and things quickly escalate to much larger jumps, including arching over obstacles and jumping off basketball hoops to land inside of the designated area marked with orange cones.

The brutal difficulty of this game feels more like a roguelike than a physics backflip game. You have three lives, fall on your face three times and you start the whole level over. Initially this seems annoying, but it's just stupid how intense this makes things. iOS games don't often make me yell in real life, yet, I've lost count at the number of audible "OH COME ON!" that have been invoked as I make it farther than I ever had in a level then just completely bungle my backflip. Game over, start over.

The "just one more try" factor is through the roof, especially as you fully realize just how simple the task at hand is. Do a backflip. Press a button four times. That's it! It's infuriating, but impossible to put down. People in the forum thread also seem to be having similar experiences.

This is such a weird game to even review, as I can fully admit its flaws are numerous, and it's definitely not for everyone... But, any game that has us yelling at our phones definitely deserves some attention.

I was in a panic. An actual panic.

The forest around me was changing, and I couldn't find my way back to my cottage: I was hoping to methodically explore the map, hoping to impose logic onto a shifting, supernatural landscape. It was dark, I was lost, and the Swedish snow was falling interminably -- my heart beat a little faster, I was sweating despite being in bed under a blanket, and I became upset enough to close Year Walk [$3.99] and browse Twitter for a while. It got in my head.

Granted, I was playing Simogo's latest horror-puzzle-exploration game in ideal conditions. It was dark, it was raining, I had was wearing headphones. But, Year Walk has an undeniable sense of place. It's a gripping, somber, atmospheric, and elegantly-designed game, and everyone should play it.

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There's a certain kind of puzzle game that would gnaw away at my gaming hours if I let it, logic puzzles with a hint of drawing, like Picross, or the excellent PathPix series on iOS. These are games that rely on incredibly simple and clear rules. Colors and numbers sit on a grid, and they tell you exactly how to put together a picture if only you can figure out how to make them all work together.

Puzzle Restorer [$0.99] fits perfectly within that description, but it's a new sort of beast. The picture is already there in a reference image; it's your job to make the one on screen match it. You have two limitations: the number of strokes you can make, and how much squares you can fill with paint. Within those limitations is a host of interesting puzzle possibilities.

At first the game will be very familiar to anyone who's played a PathPix title: you know the area you need to fill, and you know how many squares it will take to fill it, so all you need to figure out is the path that will manage both conditions.

From those early, easy steps the game gets more and more clever—always using the same simple rules. For instance, to paint a line you need to start it and end it on the color you want to paint with, so finding the right start and end point can be confounding. After that, you'll find you need to use more colors and more strokes to complete each puzzle.

The biggest step is when Puzzle Restorer starts demanding you mix colors—painting over black does nothing, but painting one color over another will mix the two together. Elementary school color theory will suffice here, but deciding exactly how to get the colors you need where you need them can be a bit of a trip, particularly when you need to avoid contrasting colors and anything that's already correct.

In a strange twist, the game's only real problem is communicating the image you need to replicate, especially in the more complex puzzles of the bunch. There's no full-scale reference for the image you're trying to restore, no easy overlay. That means complicated images sometimes require a lot of back-and-forth comparison, a tedious process that adds nothing to the experience.

Otherwise, there's nothing fussy to get in the way of a relaxing, thoughtful time. You can undo moves easily, or simply trace them back. You're never left wondering if a move is legal until it's too late. Just follow the rules, and all will be well.

Like any of its logic game brethren, Puzzle Restorer thrives on the strength of those rules. Because they make a solid foundation, the game is free to open up into greater and greater challenges without ever becoming bogged down in complexity. This could be the start of a puzzle game legacy if Gavina Games has the tenacity to keep it going. As a new twist on a popular type of puzzle game, there's plenty of room to grow.

The Sword & Poker games are ancient by today's standard, but, man, we couldn't get enough of them back in 2010. We reviewed both the first and the second game three years ago, but here's the gist of the game(s)- Imagine a game dripping with RPG trimmings, but all of your battles are played on a grid of cards where you have to make poker hands in order to attack monsters and crawl through dungeons.

It's one of those games that sounds totally crazy, but sucks you in and quickly becomes impossible to put down. It's debatable whether the first or the second is the better of the two, but here's what I recommend you do: Download the lite version of either or both games immediately, give it five minutes. If it clicks to you, grab 'em both. The Sword & Poker games have had sort of a mysterious life on the App Store, randomly disappearing then re-appearing like some kind of creepy carnival.

Keep in mind, these are every bit games from 2010. This means no iPhone 5 widescreen graphics, no multitasking support, and hell, it doesn't even seem to have retina display assets. None of this makes Sword & Poker any less fun.

Help Volty [$0.99 (HD)] is an experiential puzzle game that works in large part because mystery is carefully massaged into every aspect of its core design. From the sound production, to the art, to the mechanics and premise, each constituent part works together to create a lingering sense of wonder that keeps piping you into the next puzzle. It's a trip, man, and one we'd gladly welcome again -- but it's also one that isn't without faults, most of which are a direct result of all the secrets Volty constantly throws at you.

It begins with a render of a nighttime scene set deep in some sort of fantasy land -- or at least, that's you'll gather from the cobblestone tower resting in the background and the crackling campfire in the foreground. Click on the tower and you'll be transported into a alleyway. A Dark Age bum (or maybe a down-on-his-luck wizard?) is sitting there with a puzzle box and a sack strewn in front of him. There's a coin in the bag. Take it, you can pump it into the box and start the series of puzzles that define the game.

This setup leaves a lot of questions on the table, and the game doesn't try to answer them. What is this box? Is this dude going to get angry about me stealing his coin? Is he a bum or is he a wizard? Honestly, who hangs out in alleyways at night waiting for strangers to try their puzzle box out anyway? In the meantime, a floaty soundtrack is playfully teasing you to look deeper. And you do, because the mystery is irresistible.

Each puzzle, presented in an over-the-top perspective, tasks you with moving around an electronic bug that can discharge electricity. Puzzles have concrete solutions; most of the time, you need to get the bug (or bugs) to "charge" the box's wires. When charged, the box pops out a coin that unlocks the next puzzle.

As you play, bugs that you can't control are introduced, as well as "boss" monsters that can hurt you. In the "late" game, most of the box's scenarios have you flipping switches and experimenting with various wires to see what they control. Steadily, more clockwork gadgets with weird components are introduced, including tadpoles capable of generating electricity because, reasons.

In a lot of ways, each new puzzle is just as baffling as the box itself. And the new things that are introduced are clever and weird enough to make the journey interesting. Also, the ah-ha moment when you put everything together is pretty satisfying.

At the same time, it's kinda frustrating to have to learn something almost completely new with every new puzzle. The mechanics don't stack; what you learned or saw in the last puzzle, in general, won't be useful in the next.

That's not to say the puzzles aren't clever -- they are. You just have to view each as its own unique thing. Also, logic isn't the only tool you'll need to clear puzzles. You also need some dexterity, as you'll be tasked with avoiding obstacles and bad bugs as well as guiding several of your own bugs at the same time via multi-touch.

Anyway, Help Volty is a strange game set in a strange world, for sure, but that's the best part; you can't figure it out and you can't help but want to continue because you want to try. It's neat.

Earlier this afternoon, Eli and I busted our brains all over Help Volty [$0.99 (HD)], a 2D puzzle box game that tasks you with dragging little electronic bugs across a series of increasingly interesting puzzles. We weren't really playing it in the perfect context. This is one of those games where you want to turn off the lights, kick back, and soak in the atmosphere but we do think we at least conveyed what this game is shooting for.

Even though this one is a little "old" by TA Plays standards, we're pretty stoked about it. All the core design seems to really feed into an air of suspense and mystery, which are two things you don't really get from iPad games. We're going to keep at it in the hope of getting something more substantial on the site soon.

Anyway, check it out. You might dig it:

Stop everything and go grab Super Monsters Ate My Condo [Free]. It's a great game, and it's free right now on the App Store. It usually goes for a buck, so you're saving a little bit dough here if you mash the download button.

If you didn't know, Super Monsters is a frantic puzzle game that plays a bit like Jenga mixed with a traditional match-three. In the game, you swipe blocks from a multi-tiered and multi-colored condo and feed them to a duo of monsters. The blocks left slide down, and if they match, the game awards you points. Eventually, sets of matched blocks form newer, single blocks that you match for even more points.

In addition to being awesome, this was one of the first iPhone 5 games we fell in love with. If you're still looking for a good "tall phone" game, this is it.

Richard Perrin's Kairo [$4.99], released under his Locked Door Puzzle label, is billed as a minimalist, first-person exploration puzzle game. That's a mouthful, and it's true, but it doesn't begin to describe the game's texture and feel -- it's equal parts serene, melancholy, unnerving, and dreamlike.

The world of Kairo is like a playable, explorable tone poem.

Kairo's minimalism is its defining characteristic: it affects everything in the game, from the puzzle design to  the environments. There's no real narrative frame (or text, really) to speak of, just a few scattered hints that the game takes place in some deserted future-Earth. Abandoned monuments abound, but there are no people, just the puzzles and long-dormant technology they left behind. The game's environments are built out of simple shapes -- cubes, blocks, spheres -- giving the game a futuristic, alien quality.

The abstract environments, lack of narrative, and audio direction all help set the mood for each section. The lack of some over-arching emergency gives players time to relax and explore the nooks and crannies in a peaceful, pixelated garden, but it also keeps us disoriented and confused when Kairo takes a turn for the creepy and macabre. Kairo isn't a horror game per se, but it re-creates the feeling of being alone in an old house -- every scrape, every bump in the dark, every muffled footstep feels overblown and significant. Disembodied voices are terrifying when you know you're literally the only living being on a dead planet.

The game's visual and narrative style is matched by equally sparse controls and puzzle design. On the left side of the screen are virtual buttons that move your first-person avatar forward and backwards, and the the camera is controlled by touching and dragging with the right thumb or index finger. The controls are tight and simple and worked well on my iPad 2, but here's the kicker: there's no dedicated interaction button.

This means that every puzzle in the game is a mix of aural, visual, and spatial cues. With no way to interact or pick up items, entire swathes of traditional puzzles (physics puzzles, inventory management, etc.) are rendered off-limits. Some designers might find that restrictive, but Perrin finds a lot of interesting and graceful ways to work within that context, mostly with the help of audio cues -- a bell-chime for "good," a cymbal crash for "bad" -- and visual symbols. The majority of the puzzles are logic-based, which works well with the control scheme and mood of the game.

Perhaps my favorite puzzle involves walking on a giant track-pad connected to two wall-mounted dials: moving vertically moves one dial, but moving horizontally moves the other. Getting the dials aligned just so -- there are clues on the wall to help you figure out where this is -- will activate the machinery necessary to advance.

Doing away with text-based instructions and relying on atmospheric clues makes Kairo an elegant and understated game, but that elegance isn't always intuitive. Kairo is perhaps over-dependent on players paying close attention to each puzzle's fine details, or on making connections between disparate parts of the world -- even after "solving" a puzzle, you may not notice what affect it had or why it was important. Kairo doesn't always do a good job highlighting the salient features of its design: I was stuck for two days on the game's second hub area before I had an epiphany about how to interact with the game's numerous fragmented monoliths, for example.

It also helps to know that kairo is the Japanese word for "circuit": there are four hub areas, each with a number of puzzle rooms attached. Once each puzzle is solved, the circuit is complete, the hub area is activated, and the player can move on. Given the lack of text or narrative in Kairo, learning the structure can do a lot to keep players focused and oriented.

In any case, any unintuitiveness is largely mitigated by a generous hint system. Kairo isn't about making players feel dumb or setting up arbitrary challenges and goal posts: Perrin is obviously focused on letting the player explore the mysterious world he created, see how it works, and try to make sense of it. There are no penalties for using the hints or experimenting as much as you need to solve each puzzle -- it's more important to see what the world has to offer than it is to be stumped by a designer's funky logic.

I like that Kairo demands attention, demands that you clear out some time, relax, go slowly, and be observant. It's a thoughtful, deliberate, and delicate game. Few players, I would imagine, unlock of all of Kairo's secrets during one play through -- there are a few optional rooms that I haven't been able to wrap my head around, hints or no hints. Even after having beaten Kairo, it's story is still mercurial and vague -- all that exploration provided more questions than it did answers.

Kairo's roots as an indie PC game are apparent, but it's made a great transition to iOS. The controls are responsive and well-suited to touch devices, but more importantly, Kairo brings something fresh and unique to the platform -- there's nothing like it, to the best of my knowledge, on the App Store. We need more games like it.

There's nothing better than a big, crackling fire, for ambiance, for warmth, for burning all your belongings. In the world of Little Inferno [$4.99], the best thing in life is getting a new toy or gizmo in the mail, tossing it in your Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace, and setting it on fire. In fact, there may be nothing else. Nothing else at all.

This might seem like an exercise in futility—burning up every bit of progress you make—but it isn't. Not quite. There's something Tomorrow Corporation is trying to tell you in this game, something that isn't entirely comfortable to reflect upon. It's a message that can't be discussed without spoilers, so suffice it to say that it will resonate with mobile gamers—probably much more than any other audience. Just one of a few reasons Little Inferno feels right cozy on iPad.

The device also makes a pretty good window right into your Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace. Dragging things into the fireplace feels natural; setting them on fire even more so. You can hold a fingertip near something that burns and watch as the heat from your flame lights it up. Or you can sweep your finger around haphazardly, lighting everything in bright flame. All Little Inferno is missing is some heat and the smell of burning fur and plastic.

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Aside from downloadable content that lets you dress a marshmallow in a medieval helmet, Rise of the Blobs [Free] doesn't have much in common with Wind-Up Knight. Both are made by Robot Invader, but Wind-Up Knight [Free] was a viciously funny precision platformer while Rise of the Blobs is a matching game with broader humor. Jiggly blobs, fruit splatters and big bright colors, all these things are hallmarks of a friendlier, simpler game. Here's the thing about Robot Invader's games, though—what you can see on the surface rarely reflects the depth of what's beneath.

Let's not give too much thought to the premise. A friendly marshmallow named Mal stands atop a mighty, rotating tower while cubic blobs rise up below him. He throws down fruit of many colors at an increasingly frantic rate. If you match a piece of fruit with the same colored blob it will be absorbed, and you can pop the whole works. This triggers a chain that pops any adjacent blobs of the same color.

For a few seconds, Rise of the Blobs might fool you. It might make you think it's a walk in the park. Not for long. The difficulty curve is steep. The first few lobs of fruit are slow and steady, and the swipe-to-drop mechanic comes in handy.

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Nineties-era 16-bit gamers who spent time in front of an Atari ST or Amiga might recall a rather unique and atmospheric first-person 3D game with an ominous premise. Archipelagos places you hovering above a chain of islands, once inhabited by a mysterious race known as the Ancients. Long dead at the hands of the Visitors, another race of their own creation, the Ancients' blood soaked into the land, poisoning it and bringing forth the twisted, writhing trees that crawl across the islands. And, standing as evidence of the dominion of the Visitors is a lone monolith and the smaller stones spread about the landscape from which it draws power to keep the Ancients at bay.

Archipelagos is a strategy puzzle game developed by Paul Carruthers of Astral Software and released in 1989 to critical acclaim, receiving an 84% rating in Amiga/ST Format, and a 92% from The One magazine. Original developer Carruthers, who also created Mortal Kombat, Batman Forever, and T2: The Arcade Game for the Sega Genesis, has just released a remake of his 1989 classic, Archipelagos [$0.99], here 24 years later, for iOS (Universal) as well as the BlackBerry Playbook / 10 (with an Android version on the way) under the Anthill Games label.

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Heads up: Edge Extended [$2.99] is now free for what we assume will be a limited time. The app is usually $2.99, so you'll be saving a few bucks if you jump on this sale.

Edge Extended, if you're not in the loop, is a re-mix of Edge, which is a block-based puzzle game that tasks you with rolling a cube through dynamic mazes. This version of the game uses a new engine and boasts other bits of unique content including 48 brand new levels and new mechanics to play around with.

Basically, if you like Edge you'll probably dig Extended. We've embedded a video below to give you an idea of what you're about to get into for zero bucks:

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes [$4.99] is one of those games I just can't get enough of. I've picked it up on three different platforms so far, and through them all there's been one constant: it offers an excellent blend of strategy, puzzles and roleplaying. It's more than worth playing, be it on PSN or XBLA, on Nintendo DS, or on Steam. iPad, too—aside from a few big bugs. iPhone, on the other hand? Not so much. Asynchronous multiplayer is a wonderful addition, but it comes at a cost.

Clash of Heroes takes a touch too much squinting on the small screen, but I could live with that if it weren't for the frustrating controls. This is a game that's likely to make most people feel uncomfortably fat fingered. You can zoom in on the action, which helps, but then you can't see the enemy team. The iPad, even the Mini, fares so much better it may as well be a different game. In fact, it probably ought to be - the iPhone version would benefit from a complete overhaul.

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