Magic Garden

Sometimes the most innocent-looking things are the most dangerous. Take the ferret for instance – small, furry and cute - yet try to pet one and it’ll try and take off your finger in a flurry of biting teeth.

The same principle applies to Magic Garden, which at first glance appears to be another one of those cutesy, casual games that can be ploughed through on a bus ride with no real effort involved.

Don’t be fooled though, because underneath the bright exterior beats the heart of a vicious puzzle-monster with a hungry appetite for suffering and pain.

Magic Garden tasks the player - via their witch avatar - with ploughing fields, growing flowers and developing an irrational fear of rocks, boulders and brightly coloured keys.

You start each level with a fresh field littered with the aforementioned objects and a small paved path running along the outside.

Once you’ve moved your witch away from the safety of the paving stones, she flies across ploughing, planting, watering as she goes until an obstacle stops her, or she reaches the safety of the paving on the other side.

Being the lazy sort, she can’t go back over a previously visited section of the field and hates doubling back on herself, which means it’s extremely easy to accidentally trap her in.

The first warning sign that the game might be trickier than most comes as early as the second puzzle, which embarrassingly managed to stump me for a good few minutes before solving it.

This feeling wasn't helped by the hints which pop up at the bottom of the screen with every illegal move made, gently mocking you by repeating instructions like ‘You cannot go backwards' or ‘Pick up the key first’. Which I ended up reading as ‘Let me spell out the rules again for you, because you’re obviously too thick for this'.

The frustration that comes from a difficult puzzle is significantly reduced by the generous undo feature that can take you back as many steps as you need, with no punishments for taking your time over things either.

It’s also nice to play a game that doesn’t penalise you for not completing every single puzzle before letting you move onto the next part.

The only requirement for unlocking each block of 12 is that any four of the previous set must already be completed, which is great news for you Puzzled? veterans who found its ‘must complete everything before continuing’ mentality draining.

It’s this set of puzzle players that Magic Garden will most appeal to, not the casual crowd as its name and presentation suggests.

Although also like Puzzled?, there’s very little guidance if you do get genuinely stuck. The difficulty curve is all over the place too, with some early levels far harder than the latter ones.

But despite this, Magic Garden should prove to be a big hit with those fans who are willing to let it dig its teeth in.