Creepytown

Breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck, so God only knows how many years breaking an urn in Creepytown consigns you to. Fortunately, expectations get smashed just as frequently as urns in this surprising brickbreaker spin off.

After you get called in by the mayor to corral a cadre of lost souls, your finger serves to swipe the Grim Reaper's scythe. Ghosts bounce off the residual energy of a scythe swipe, enabling you to control their movement indirectly. Much in the style of a brickbreaker game, Creepytown is all about deflecting ghosts at the right angles to complete each stage.

Stages are filled with urns that often must be broken in order to access and even activate the portal the ghost must pass through to reach the afterlife. While your only objective lies in shepherding the spirit to the underworld, doing so usually requires a strategy of urn-busting and avoiding dangerous soul traps.

Since levels aren't always vertically oriented and you're able to slash anywhere with the scythe, Creepytown avoids becoming just another brickbreaker. Its objective-driven design does great service to what is otherwise scarily plain gameplay.

Levels are straightforward and there's little variety in the obstacles you encounter, yet the game keeps you focused on delivering each soul to the underworld instead of tediously having to clear every urn from a given level. Most stages can be completed without destroying a majority of urns on the screen and in some cases with only a scant few touched. Extra points are awarded for doing so, of course, but this is left to you and your desire to rack up a high score.

The game's morbid charm also keeps you hooked through the course of 50 levels, even if you're unlikely to have the patience to sit through more than a handful in any one sitting. Creepytown is a delightful distraction, though it's only as substantial as the spirits with which it wrangles.