I found Bloktonik to be pretty tough the first half-a-dozen times I played – on the easy setting. Different colour blocks fall to the centre of the playing grid from four directions; your job is to stack them so that four or more of the same colour touch. When that happens, they clear off.

The key here is keeping in mind the four different gravity directions as you preview the next block. It filled up my RAM pretty fast. But it does deliver a moderately addicting challenge. And as I said, I dug the soundtrack – for as much as I heard of it before losing anyway. Then I just started up a game and pressed pause while I wrote this.

Jason Cirillo, of Bloktonik’s studio Robotube Games, said the WiiWare version is “in the very early stages at this point.

“We’re talking to a very influential company with a lot of WiiWare experience about publishing the game, and we are eyeing a release for next year. I’m dying to give more details on the release, but the suits would beat me unmerciful if I did since we’re still hashing out the plan. I will say that the WiiWare version will be a more refined, feature-packed title than its Flash counterpart.

Cirillo said a version of the game for iPhone is “about 70 percent done.”

Bloktonik [Site]

In this moody puzzle game, players take the role of a mysterious person invited to a mysterious birthday party in a mysterious building. Sensing a theme here?

What Is It?
Rooms is a puzzle game where players navigate each room of a hotel by completing a sliding panel puzzle. The player’s character can only occupy one panel at a time and can only move between panels that are connected by ladders, teleporting phone boxes or doors. Each sliding panel puzzle has one gold-lined door within it that you’re trying to move your character to.

What We Saw
I played three intermediate-level puzzles.

How Far Along Is It?
Crazy early days. The game isn’t due out on Wii or DS until some unspecified point in 2010 and the developer is still making gameplay related decisions about what should be in the game.

What Needs Improvement?
Move Tracker: At present, the game doesn’t seem to know or care how many moves it takes you to slide all the panels where they need to be. It’s something the developer might consider adding — and I really hope they do, or else the game will be missing out on a basic layer of skill tracking that games like Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box appeal to.

It’s SO Small: Currently, the puzzle plane on the lower screen has a thick border around it and the individual panels of puzzles are barely bigger than a thumb print. This makes it really hard to see your brown-clad character in the sepia toned rooms and robs Rooms of some of its noir charm by limiting what you can see.

What Should Stay The Same?
Challenging: I didn’t get stuck in any of the three sliding puzzles, but I definitely got confused or turned around a few times. To me, this proves the concept of the game as something I want to take with me on public transit.

The Puzzles Scale Up: The intermediate puzzles were only on a 3×2 grid or a 3×3 grid — but harder levels can scale up to 8×8 girds which will probably take an awful lot of time to sort out.

Platform-Specific Features: The Wii version will have a two-player versus mode where you race each other to complete the puzzle (I assume in shortest amount of time as opposed to least number of moves). Meanwhile, the DS version will let you create your own levels to upload using Wifi for other players to try.

Final Thoughts
I really liked what I saw of Rooms. If it keeps developing along the lines its been using, it’ll shape up into a proper love-child of Professor Layton and Hotel Dusk.

Cat Got Lost is a puzzle game where you need to collect keys to unlock doors and, eventually, find your cat. Because each key can only be used once and will only unlock a like-coloured door, you have to think carefully about the order in which you open them.

The cat squeals when you rescue it. It’s cute.

Cat Got Lost [Stephen Lavelle]

A Mazing Monk, as it’s called, has you guiding the titular monk through a maze to collect orbs. The maze is actually distributed around a cube; each segment of the cube can be rotated like a Rubik’s cube, thus altering the layout of the maze.

Also in the maze is a group of soldiers. If you manage to clear a direct path between your monk and the soldiers, they’ll hunt you down and, well… shoot you to bits. Game over.

So yeah, orbs good, soldiers bad. I’m sure there’s some spiritual message in that for all of us.

A Mazing Monk [official site]

The goal is to shoot a projectile from A to B. Thing is, the path from A to B is rarely straightforward. You’ll have to place a host of magnets around the playfield to influence the projectile’s route. Some magnets attract, some repel, some create a magnetic field only in a particular direction, and so on.

How many levels can you pass this lunchtime?

MagnetiZR [Newgrounds]

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.

This review was submitted by Steven Bogos. If you’ve played Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box, or just want to ask Steven more about it (especially since it’s out in Australia next week!), leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box (DS)

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box is the second game to be released in English for the Professor Layton series of puzzlers on DS. This game picks up shortly after the events of the first one, with Layton and his apprentice Luke setting off to discover the secret of the ‘Elysian Box’, a box that reportedly kills anyone who opens it.

Loved:

If it ain’t broke…: The Diabolical Box succeeds in capturing the feel of the first game perfectly. The exploration aspects, the collectable mini-games (such as assembling a camera or, strangely enough, exercising a hamster) right down to the puzzles themselves are all reminiscent of the Layton charm that will be welcoming to newcomers and veterans alike

Plenty to do: I finished the main storyline in about 12 hours, which was a bit longer than it took me to finish the first game, but I haven’t yet touched on any of the bonus puzzles, which include free weekly downloadables, and the super hard ‘Professor’s Challenges’. The puzzles are different enough from the first game, and varied enough in themselves to make sure you will never get bored.

Hated:

Badly worded puzzles: Not sure if this is a fault of the translators, or the puzzle designers themselves, but there were more than a few puzzles in this game that had me teeming with frustration due to their poor word choice. Some puzzles, even with all their hints revealed, made me tear my hair out due to their horrible vagueness.

Overall, there is not much to fault in the new Layton, it is a very solid puzzler, which borrows and extends on the elements that made the original so successful and it finishes in a cut-scene so fantastic, I couldn’t bear to spoil it for you here.

Reviewed by: Steven Bogos

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

99 Bricks is Tetris in that familiar-shaped bricks fall from the sky, one at a time, and can be moved left and right and rotated before settling at the bottom of the well.

Where it departs is that the objective isn’t to form solid horizontal lines to clear space. Quite the opposite: you have to build a tower of a certain height. The bricks possess a certain physics and will topple over if you haven’t laid sufficient foundation – tricky given the irregular shapes and the fact you only have a limited number of bricks.

As a Tetris clone with a twist it, er… stacks up quite well.

99 Bricks [Kongregate]

The original non-HD Trials is a puzzle-based Flash title that has players navigate stunt courses with a dirt bike. Impressive game physics keep things challenging as players try to make it through the courses as fast as possible with the fewest mistakes. Trials HD brings those realistic physics, impossible jumps and exploding barrels to Xbox Live Arcade — all on a 2D plane using 3D graphics.

How does the home console version hold up?

Loved
Simple, Yet Deep, Oh So Deep: The controls in Trials HD are bare bones: thumbstick for forward and back, right trigger to accelerate and left trigger to stop. Simple, right? Deceptively so. The game is incredibly deep, as Trials HD keeps throwing harder and harder tracks at you, pushing you to become increasingly responsive in how you use those controls. The learning curve is steep and brutal at times, leaving you almost wanting to chuck your controller in frustration. It is, however, tremendously satisfying to go back to courses you’ve completed before and see just how your skills have improved.

Let’s Get Physic(al): The physics are the star here — and what a star. Trials HD actually gives you the feeling of landing a tricky set of jumps. During play, don’t be surprised to find yourself leaning forward slightly as you fly through the air and relax as you touch down safely.

Hated
Hard In A Good Way And A Bad Way: Trials HD is hard. Really hard. The later courses can be frustratingly hard — to the point of giving up. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, part of the frustration isn’t the inability to just nail a jump, but know how to figure out the puzzle. Guess that’s why they’re puzzling, no? Some of the harder courses are hard because they are neither instinctive nor based on previous experience and sometimes seem to come out of left field. The game doesn’t build up to some of the more frustrating courses, and they seem shoehorned in.

Trials HD is everything you want from a downloadable title: It’s short and fun in quick bursts, but stands up to long play sessions and has fantastic replay value.

Released on August 12, Trials HD was developed by RedLynx and published by Microsoft for Xbox LIVE Arcade. Retails for 1200 Microsoft Points. Played all beginner, easy and medium tracks as well as some hard tracks. Tested out the level editor.

In a bleak world, legend tells of a child queen who will one day rise to give hope to a world filled with despair. In Drawn, you must unlock riddles and solve puzzles as you work your way to the top of The Painted Tower in order to save the young girl who would be queen. I’m completely surprised that this is the first I’ve heard of this title, because it’s right up my alley—a gorgeous art style, point and click adventure gameplay and puzzles aplenty. I may not have heard of it before, but now I am drooling.

Luckily I won’t have long to wait for the release. Drawn: The Painted Tower is being released at 12.01am Pacific time this Friday (5.01pm today AEST) at BigFishGames.com for the low, low price of $US6.99.

Each level is a cube constructed of platforms around a cental core. Your avatar must get from its starting position to the exit door. You can walk left and right, jump and run.

You can also spin the cube around with the mouse. Gravity comes into play in that you can’t fall off the cube, you’ll only be able to fall around it… if you know what I mean. The puzzle solutions stem from being able to work out how to best utilise the rotation of the cube in concert with this gravitational effect.

Can you beat all 15 levels this lunchtime?

BoxGame [Sophie Houlden]