Previous Next

Imagine life without the wheel. Picture the earth and everything in it as a cube. Sound far-fetched? Well, that's as may be, but squaring the world is the twisted ambition of the obsessive geometrist Dr Devious. And you, JJ Maverick, are the only person who can stop him.

Devious Designs is a multi-level time-constrained puzzle game involving plenty of joystick waggling and random Fire button pressing. Each level starts by giving you a clue as to how to move onto the next one. For example, in Level One - a winter wonderland scene - you're told to practise lifting and carrying. If you do this with the right blocks at the right time, you're rewarded with a circular igloo. Level Two greets you with "Jumping Jehosophat" - and sure enough, lots of bounding about banging your head on the ceiling sends you off on a London bus sporting the poster "Cubed Earth? [Tick]" Once you get to the third level, you might wish you hadn't bothered, since you're upside-down inside what looks like an obscure fairground attraction constructed of blocks and ribbons. Being inverted, it's difficult to control where you're going, let alone bother to waste energy worrying about saving fairy cakes from eternal regularity.

To achieve your mission, you have to try to get to falling objects before they disappear into a cloud of dust - things like slimy snails, all sorts of fruit, tuneless tubas, a selection of European flags, the moon and stars... just what you'd expect, really. These things are more or less the same size as each other - and you, too. But don't worry about the potentially jammy effects of an outsized strawberry landing on you, since the objects ping satisfyingly into points as they touch you - or, indeed, as you run blindly into them.

The graphics are pretty detailed and colourful, and, while there's not an enormouse amount going on, it's plenty if you're determined to plough your way through the levels rather than fiddle around earning points. There are some good touches like the cloud that floats past white and smiling if you're doing well, but grey and frowning if you're failing miserably.

Devious Designs has a simple plot, a simple aim and, what with the clues to the different strategies you need to employ, you don't have to use too much brain power - ruthlessness with your joystick is far more effective. So, unless you have real concerns about the future of the spherical earth, Devious Designs isn't likely to keep you interested beyond a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon. In a nutshell, in fact, you'd have to be a real square to want to play this.

1. Pretty, colourful and detailed graphics - it's more attractive to look at than Tetris.
2. An original though totally unrealistic idea, making it difficult to get too excited about.