House MD

When it comes to some of our favourite TV shows and films, it's not especially easy to weave gameplay into their plots and settings. Well, not successfully.

How would you, for instance, simulate House's rounds on your mobile phone? Turn it into some kind of platformer, with Stephen Fry's other half leaping and bounding over hospital beds and picking up drips along the way to use as fuel?

Thankfully, Babaroga has seen fit to avoid such a path, but it has to be said that the route it has chosen isn't necessarily any more fruitful.

While House MD's play might be sandwiched with plenty of quick-witted dialogue (or painfully palaverous if, like me, the television series isn't your cup of tea) that could be lifted from the show itself, its gameplay is actually a simple little puzzler, decoding grids full of symbols the order of the day.

In terms of plot, you play a newcomer to House's band of followers, your job being to use clues given to you by his cast of characters to help you diagnose one patient after another.

In reality, you assign each character the job of researching a particular area - the higher the difficulty of the diagnosis, the longer it takes them.

The clues they give come in the form of equations that help you decide how to decode said grid, set symbols belonging in set squares.

Each square comes with a number of options, the equations helping you eliminate the potential candidates one by one until you're able to fill in the entire grid.

The clues themselves are both clear and cryptic, some telling you straight out what symbol should be placed where, others merely hinting, letting you know that they're along the same line as those already placed, or most certainly don't reside in certain areas.

The idea is to gradually piece together the grid's contents, each call you make revealing another, and another, until the grid is full and diagnosis made.

It's fairly entertaining stuff, if a little repetitive when played for long periods. The time you spend waiting for the clues to be revealed is rather pointless and seemingly only serves as some kind of artificial difficulty level.