How Do You Play? Use Boxmen

Here's a gorgeous little puzzle game to warm your cockles. Called Use Boxmen, it's a deceptively simple Flash game, requiring a decent amount of smarts. There's tones of Cursor*10, a lot of platform nous, and an interesting play on multiple lives to complete a level.

So each level you have to take your little boxman to reach a cube. But along the way are obstacles and challenges that require more than one character to get past. So your character can spawn a limited number of copies of himself. If he's stood still, then the clone will be stood still. If he's running when you hit Shift, then the clone will keep on running until he's trapped or destroyed. Jump and spawn, and the clone will take an extra leap.

It's so very cute, the lovely crayon-esque drawings gleefully happy as they dash about to their explodey deaths. This is accompanied by some really lovely music - the only problem being it often seems to just stop and doesn't come back. As the thirteen levels go by the difficulty ramps up significantly, with some properly tricky puzzles to complete. Way too difficult for my tiny brain by the end. But thankfully there's a rather splendid walkthrough on JayIsGames.

Once you're done with it, take a look around creator Greg Sergeant's games website to play with some of his earlier ideas.