Life-Gun: GROW Cannon
As sure as night follow days, as sure as all of us will one day die, as sure as cats are better than dogs, I will post about new GROW games whenever one emerges. Enigmatic creator On is perhaps guilty of sticking to formula with these web-based puzzle titles, but latest effort Cannon manages to shake things up a little.
The concept is, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it's always been - press a series of buttons to trigger a series of events, and through a concept of trial, error, luck and beyond-lateral thinking you'll eventually piece together the order of pressing necessary for great victory.
Cannon's major change is to drag the interface (and with it, you) into the game - no longer a set of entirely externalised and abstracted buttons, but instead the titular big gun. Choose an area of the screen to fire at, witness the inevitably unexpected results, work out how that relates to the creatures and reactions that result from bombarding other areas.
Your goal? Wake up a phenomenally soundly-sleeping chap on the far right of the screen. If you've max-levelled every one of the key items in the game, he'll come to. If don't, he'll suffer a hell of pestering but somehow doze through it. The key's in the minimalist cuteness, as always.
Not the most oblique one he's ever done, though I can't say whether that's good or bad. I managed to muddle through without consulting a walkthrough, which hasn't always been the case, but figuring out the final button press took a little while and involved some mildly maddening repetition. As GROW games always are though, it was worth it in the end.