Minimalist, and yet complex. Simple but challenging. Stylish and plain. Polarium is certainly a contradictory game. One of the more relaxing, mellow Nintendo DS launch titles, Polarium has you manipulating the stylus across the touch screen (no buttons required throughout) in order to flip tiles. Flipping black tiles over to white and white tiles over to black, the main chunk of this game involves creating rows of the same colour so that all of the tiles disappear, using only a single stylus-drawn line. While the premise is simpler than it sounds on paper, the execution becomes rapidly more demanding, with some fiendishly difficult puzzles appearing sooner than you might expect. There are one hundred of these tile-flipping challenges to work your way through, providing a relaxing yet intellectually taxing way to spend a long car journey or a miserable Sunday afternoon. However, some of the later puzzles will have you staring at the touch screen in desperation, racking your brains so that the solution might become clear. This means the game is a lot less accessible in this area when compared to the simplicity of, say, fellow DS launch title Zoo Keeper.

This is where the bulk of Polarium’s gameplay value can be found, as working your way through these puzzles will take weeks – and that’s if you’re good at puzzle games. Thankfully, however, there is more to the game – you can create your own puzzles and send them to nearby DS systems thanks to the wireless features, as well as a Polarium demo if they’d like to experience the game for themselves. Once you’ve completed all the puzzles and are wondering if the game has more life to it, however, the game has a Challenge mode providing a more quick-fix solution to your boredom.

In Challenge mode, huge blocks of tiles drop down from the top screen and onto the touch screen, where you must quickly eliminate all the tiles in the same manner as in Puzzle mode, using as many strokes as you like. If you aren’t quick enough, however, the blocks will build up and make things gradually more challenging – once the tower of blocks reaches a red barrier on the top screen, you lose. Much more accessible than the game’s main Puzzle mode, Challenge mode is still as puzzling as the name suggests, requiring lightning fast reactions and precise yet speedy manipulation of the stylus in order to succeed.

There’s very little else more to this game, in all honesty – but puzzle games were never about being overcomplicated and deep. While Polarium isn’t as accessible as some of its peers, this is the ideal title if you’re looking for a relaxing game you can literally spend hours puzzling over, with its intuitive interface and sedate, somewhat repetitive soundtrack. A possible sleeper hit among big titles like Super Mario 64 DS and WarioWare Touched, Polarium is a decent title with no unnecessary bells and whistles that is well worth picking up.

James Hamilton