Dyson (Nothing To Do With Vacuum Cleaners)

Dyson, by Alex May, Rudolf Kremers, and Brian Grainger, seems to have rounded off an oddly vacuum-cleaner themed evening that I've had, here at RPS Country Retreat (as my new abode will henceforth be known). It's nothing to do with vacuum cleaners, of course, it just happens to share its name with a popular brand of sucking appliance.

In fact Dyson is a wonderful ambient strategy in which you conquer an abstract asteroid belt with the seed-ships which emerge from the trees that you grow on the surface of the asteroids you conquer... still with me? Okay then. It's beautiful: soft yet strategic, fierce yet calm. Sending out swarms of seeds to battle with AI-controlled asteroid populations is weird enough to stimulate the tired old skull-glands, and simplistic enough be completely engrossing. It seems like a bit of a work in progress, but if you don't play anything else in the next week, you should probably play this.

I found Dyson, of course, via the incomparably excellent Indiegames.com.