A Good Spell: Prose And Motion

This fantastic webgame came to us via a tip from Jack, for which we salute him. Called Prose and Motion, it's by MoFunZone.com. It's a remarkably clever idea, taking something as simple as solving anagrams, and applying fifteen types of smart to it. It's spelling meets physics meets lateral thinking.

So rather than simply rejig the word, the letters here are all physical objects in the room. Each is picked up and moved around, being careful not to swing it into the others and knock them over, or off ledges, and so on. Often the scene will have other items in it too, sometimes purely decoration, other times part of the solution. For instance, in one level you must build a bridge from blocks and planks before you can spell out the word.

The next twist is the ability to rotate letters. S an M can be swung around to become an E, or perhaps a W. C is also U. N could be Z. And so on. The makes the possible solutions available more varied, of course, which is why each level has what it describes as a "perfect" word. This is a word associated with the cryptic clue on screen. You can advance with any word, but simply being told it falls short of perfection is often temptation enough to retry. Get too annoyed with not being able to spot the word it's after and the "solution" button takes you to videos of each level being solved.

Like so many indie games are really getting right just now, it has the most splendid difficulty curve, improving the complexity of each level steadily and in a constantly interesting way. Which is no meat feat. The letter rotation thing is inspired, and the design is cute, simple, and incessantly smart.