With a surprisingly heavy story, The Pretender tells the tale of a magician who accidentally warps his audience through a portal to another world. Oh, and they all seem to have become ghosts in the process.

So you have to rescue them, negotiating minor platforming and some more major puzzling to guide each audience member’s ghost back to the real world.

As a magician in this alternate world, you’re able to harness an elemental power to shift your body into air or earth. These elements hold the solution to the game’s puzzles.

The Pretender’s beginner and easy levels are currently playable, while the medium and hard levels are temporarily locked. But do check it out now and bookmark those tougher levels for later.

The Pretender [2BeeGames]

Cleverly, all the relevant hotspots are highlighted for you, leaving the challenge of working out the order in which you need to click them.

The developer’s plot description goes thusly: “There was once a world of living robots. But one day a bad accident occured in the main power generator. The world fell into a deep sleep. Bring life back to the world!”

So you move your little robot around, clicking on gears and levers and all kinds of contraptions. Get them working properly and you’ll move onto the next screen and that world will be a little closer to waking up.

Give it a try.

Little Wheel [Fast Games]

Collision tasks you with keeping your white ball inside an arena for as long as possible. It’s complicated by the gradual appearance of more and more red balls, some of which chase after you and try to bump you out, others remain still but continually shoot at you.

You can shoot back, but like Pacificism the key is to try to stay out of trouble at all times.

What’s the highest score you can get?

Collision [Kongregate]

Learn To Fly gives you a penguin, a ramp and a stern determination to prove evolution wrong. Slide down the ramp then launch your penguin into the air, tapping the arrow keys to adjust its body weight in flight.

Completing jumps earns you cash based on time, distance and height. This cash can then be spent on upgrades to your penguin’s aerodynamics and the ramp it uses. There are even gliders and rockets to buy as you strive for greater air time.

Learn To Fly [ArmorGames]

Sure, later on you get beach balls too, but Cat Cat Watermelon Beach Ball wouldn’t have made for as catchy a title.

So, Cat Cat Watermelon then. You stack these objects on top of each other. There’s some simple physics, too, and the joy comes from pushing your teetering tower of cats and watermelons to the very edge.

Careful though, one cat (or watermelon) overboard and it’s game over.

Cat Cat Watermelon [Lexaloffle]

Headspin Storybook gives you a pop-up book and tasks you with turning the right-hand page into a mirror version of the left. All you do is click on the pop-up objects to flip them round.

Sounds easy?

It is. Until the distinguishing features of each object become smaller and smaller, the sheer number of objects overwhelms you, and the strict time limit urges you into a mess of frantic clicking.

Not so easy now, is it?

Headspin Storybook [State of Play Games]

Crush The Castle gives you a trebuchet loaded with a limited number of rocks. There’s a castle consisting of a precariously stacked collection of wood, brick and people. Launch your trebuchet to knock down the castle and kill its inhabitants.

Physics come into play as the rock hits the structure, the fortifications wobble and collapse. Once you’ve knocked down on castle, you can select a new one to conquer via the world map.

Give it a go.

Crush The Castle [Armor Games]

Fans of the rejuvenating gameplay of Flower or De Blob will find the same kind of soothing joy of bringing life to the world in Puzzle Bloom.

You play a wisp that is able to possess the poor inhabitants of this dull brown world. When close enough to another, you can jump between them and assume control of your new avatar. A simple early puzzle sees you guide one avatar to a pressure pad that opens a door, then jump to a second avatar and proceed through the door. Things quickly develop into complex, multi-stage tasks that require plenty of forethought.

The idea is to find trigger points – swirly green circles on the ground – that when stepped on will transform the surrounding world into a lush green environment full of trees, grass and flowers.

There’s an analogy to be made with Friday afternoons there somewhere, I’m sure…

Puzzle Bloom [official site]

Your Friday afternoon timewaster today is a cute yet macabre puzzler in which you play Death.

Bloody Fun Day sees you taking scythe to an assortment of “cuties”, multi-coloured critters who need to be hacked into bloody pulps to sustain you. It’s OK though, their mashed corpses turn into eggs and hatch new cuties soon enough.

Ultimately, Bloody Fun Day is a puzzle game about survival, about setting up chains of moves to ensure Death always has somewhere to go and some new life to feed on. It’s rather addictive. What’s your high score?

Bloody Fun Day [Kongregate]

It’s Geometry Wars, basically. ‘Cept with a shop where you purchase weapon upgrades. Oh, and bullet time, for when you need to navigate a particularly tricky swarm of enemies. If that doesn’t make Death vs. Monstars sound like the ideal Friday afternoon fun, then I’m glad I’m not you.

Death vs. Monstars [GameReclaim]