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Earlier this week the fine folks at Game Factory contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in a sample of one of their latest titles, Rubik's World, to look over and write about. I said sure, why not, because what else do you say when someone is offering you a free video game? So my care package from Game Factory showed up, and it was jammed to the gills with recent Game Factory releases.

I'm going to try to talk about them all, and I decided to start with Zenses because it's the sort of DS title I'm usually a sucker for: little collections of puzzle games. I really like to listen to podcasts or have the TV on in the background while I play that sort of thing. It turns out this isn't really a very feasible way to play Zenses, though...

Zenses isn't just a puzzle game collection. It also wants to be a brain training game, so all of the games are variations on classic logic puzzles. Some are better than others, but most are surprisingly challenging. Developer Shin'en (creators of the Nanostray series) included five challenges for each of the six games contained in each cart. They're basically Achievements and for the most part do a decent job of keeping you playing. Otherwise there's no real inducement to keep going beyond your desire to play, arcade-style.

There are two different SKUs of Zenses, Ocean and Rainforest, each with the graphical theme you'd expect. In Ocean you move around shells and fish, while Rainforest gives you flowers and stones. Each game also has very distinctive, really quite nice mood music. It's totally ambient, and of the chill out and relax genre without being very boring. Gamefactory has put up the soundtrack for both SKUs for totally free download, a classy move that I totally endorse. While there are instructions for downloading the songs in the Zenses manual, they're actually incorrect. What you need to do is go to the Zenses homepage and just click Music Download to go to the right Flash deely-bob to get the songs.

While I dig the ambient Zenses soundtrack, which really isn't like anything I've heard in a DS game before, I'm not sure how well it meshes with the gameplay. Oh, it meshes with the graphical themes in each game just fine, but there's nothing intrinsically relaxing about solving logic puzzles. Both Zenses SKUs also tend to make you solve the logic puzzles on a timer, with anywhere from five minutes to as little as thirty seconds to solve a puzzle. Some of the games can get really frantic, especially if you opt to play them on higher Intensity (read: difficulty levels). A long Zenses marathon tended to leave me feeling a bit twitchy and hyper, the way I'd feel after a few hours playing Tetris. All told, while the logic puzzle gameplay in Zenses is mostly good, the game's relaxation theme should've been matched to some lower-key game mechanics.

Zenses Ocean

Each of the Zenses SKUs has a totally unique selection of puzzle games to play, which is thoroughly classy. Ocean offers six:

• zen-stones: A game that looks surprisingly like Bejeweled but isn't played much like it. Touch two adjacent stones of the same type to make them disappear. If you can clear a board, you move to the next round. If you can't, say if you let stones fall in such a way that you can't eliminate them, then it's game over. This is by far my favorite of all the Zenses mini-games, because it's hits the easy to play, difficult to master sweet spot for a puzzle game. It also doesn't use a time limit mechanic, so it is actually possible to zone out and relax while playing it... until you realize your last move just made your game unwinnable, anyway.

• pearl diver: This is another game I really dig because it's quite challenging. Pearls of various colors spawn onscreen, and you have so many turns to use to eliminate them and move on to the next round. Your stock of fifteen turns doesn't replenish itself at the beginning of each round, though. Instead, you have to earn turns as you play by drawing lines with the stylus to connect pearls of a single color into a triangle that contains other pearls inside. You get a free turn for each pearl you embrace this way, and you get more turns by surviving into the bonus round (a simple memorization game). Otherwise you can eliminate pearls by connecting two into a line, tapping one, or connecting three into an empty triangle. You can't draw any line obstructed by another pearl, though, which is where the game gets really difficult. The touchscreen can also work against you, sometimes counting an attempted triangle as merely an attempt to connect two pearls.

• turtle turn: I'm not too fond of this one because it starts too easy, and then the difficulty ramps up really quickly... so the first few rounds are always boring, and then later ones go rapidly from easily beatable to argh my brain hurts. Turtle turn's gameplay is simple, touching any of the turtle shells on the touchscreen causes all adjacent turtle shells to flip over. To pass a round, you have to make the turtle shells on the touchscreen match a pattern displayed to you on the top screen before time runs out.

• hot spot: Probably the easiest of all the Zenses games, all you have to do is assemble the pieces of a glow fish so your creature on the touchscreen looks the same as the one on the top screen. To assemble your fish you point your stylus at floating body parts and drag them over to the main body. To rotate them, you have to tap them with the stylus. While this game is played on a time limit, the time limit is extremely generate and even issues with touchscreen sensitivity won't cost you a round. Actually, I got all five challenges the first time I played it.

• shell twirl: Another really fun pattern-matching game. It's not as hard as zen-stones or pearl diver but can still be pretty tough until you get the hang of it. For shell twirl, you have to fill in the shapes in two (or three at higher difficult) rotating rings by picking shells that match them. There are two rows of shells to pick from, one coming down the right-hand top screen and one down the left. Essentially, you can only pick one of two shells at any time to try and drag into an empty shell slot. Matching colors and using special glowing or sparkling shells helps add time to the measly 30 seconds of time you have to complete the puzzle at a round's start, and you also gain bonuses for finishing a ring. Your time accrued (or lost) during a round seems to carry over to the next, but to be honest, the action usually gets so frantic that I couldn't really pay close attention. You definitely can't get more than a minute on the timer.
• wave breaker: This one honestly kind of sucks. There's nothing wrong with how it works, it's just... pretty boring to play. Basically you see a pattern of shells on a beach you're asked to memorize. Then a wave rushes in and buries all the shells in sand. To win the round, you have so many seconds to uncover however many shells the game asks you to find. It just kind of keeps on like that, with more shells to memorize.

Zenses: Rainforest

Rainforest has its own selection of six games: treasure spin, stack jack, twist n' turn, flower board, sapphire wheel, and solitaire. None of them are direct clones of the Ocean games, and one of them (sapphire wheel) is actually really cool and fun. That said, I'm pretty sure nothing I said could make you want to spend money on Zenses Rainforest, and I'll show you why.

I started off testing the treasure spin game, a physics logic puzzle where you're trying to match together four or five colored spheres by spinning the square game board they're on. It's not a hard game but I wasn't really getting it and my time ran out early on. After I got my game over and tried to return to the main menu, I saw... well, this:

... yeahhh, something about the treasure spin game occasionally causes the Rainforest cart to crash outright and go into debug mode if you try to return to the main menu after a game over. You can actually wander through the debug menu once you're there, though if you want the game to play correctly again it seems like you have to reset it after a crash.

For what it's worth, it seems like you can consistently get out of the treasure spin game normally by choosing to quit instead of letting the time run out, and once you have the hang of the gameplay you can get all of the challenges in one pass. The other games on the cart are on the whole a bit better than the Ocean games, but... honestly, do you want to buy a console title that occasionally crashes and require a hard reset?

No? I didn't think so.

Verdict Time

So, obviously, I can't recommend Zenses: Rainforest. That leaves Zenses: Ocean... and to be honest, it's not bad at all. I've found myself firing it up to play more zen-stones and shell whirl as I typed up this review. I'm not sure I can recommend it, since the game's official MSRP is $29.95. That strikes me as about ten dollars too much. If you could get it for $19.99 or less, it strikes me as a decent buy for a devoted puzzle gamer. It particularly strikes me as a pretty good gift for the Touch Generations crowd, who'd probably never give this a shot on their own but would probably enjoy the simple, stylus-focused gameplay.

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