Treasure Arm

Imagine. You're on safari. You stay back at the resort one day because you don't feel well. You reassure everybody that you'll be fine, you don't mind. You sit down with a glass of wine. The wine trembles, the glass shakes. There's a warped silhouette of a shape in the window. A lion. The guns are trundling away in a jeep along with your friends, lost now in a blooming contrail of dust. The lions eats your arm.

Treasure Arm, which took the prize for Best Casual Game at last year's IMGAwards, is like the mobile game of your convalescence.

The object is simply to learn how to use a mechanical arm. Each level contains, at the very least, a key and a padlock, and you have to collect the former in order to unlock the latter. Normally, there's more than one set, with a yellow key unlocking a yellow padlock, red unlocking red, and so on.

The arm that you need to move has an 'elbow' halfway down, and pressing '2' causes the upper part to swing clockwise around this point, while '8' sends it around anti-clockwise. Meanwhile, '4' and '6' make the whole arm turn. It's a tricky control method at first, but once you're used to it manoeuvring the arm becomes second nature.

If you're paying attention, you'll be thinking: "In what sense is that a game?" You're quite right to ask. For the first couple of levels of Treasure Arm, you assume that learning how to move the arm is a prelude to something else, like swatting fireballs away from a damsel in distress, or flicking pigs at a skylight.

When it finally becomes evident that Treasure Arm really is a game about learning how to use an arm, however, it's impossible to be disappointed, because it's one of the most original premises of the year.

To make the process of bringing key to lock more difficult, the levels are filled with crates that you need to steer your arm around, bending it into gaps and swinging it past corners like an angle-poise lamp on moving day.

You have a certain amount of ever-dispelling energy at the beginning of each puzzle, and for every second you spend in contact with a crate you lose about fifth of your supply. Given that the amount you have to begin with is generally fairly stingy, collisions are disastrous, and it's all too easy to find yourself wedged irretrievably between two crates, doomed to watch the last of your power crackle away.

Other hazards include mines, which kill you immediately, and gravity fields, which pulsate around keys and padlocks, slowing your arm down and making you easier prey for the sliding crates.

To redress the balance, there are several types of power-up scattered around Treasure Arm's 40 Main mode levels, amongst which are a giant letter 'E', which replenishes your energy, a giant 'H', which speeds you up, and an exclamation mark that zaps you straight to the next level.

To get the most of the power-ups you'll need not only to use them, but use them at the right times. Treasure Arm is all about economy of movement.

In addition to collecting power-ups, you can enter the workshop by pressing the right soft-key. Here, you can use the points you've amassed to modify your arm in a number of ways, increasing its energy capacity, rendering it temporarily invincible, or slightly extending the time you have left.

Even with the assistance of these power-ups, Treasure Arm is incredibly difficult. The time limits are short, and if you mistime an attempt to reach past a sliding crate that generally means failure, particularly since your arm moves by default at such a painfully creeping pace. You won't be getting to level 40 any time soon.

Success at Treasure Arm, then, depends more on developing a manual knack than anything else. After you've played for a few hours, you'll be steering your mechanical arm into tiny spaces, swivelling it towards power-ups and, more importantly, doing so optimally, picking everything up in the correct order almost by instinct.

Whether this all combines to make much of a game is unclear, just as standing at the claw-grabber booth in an arcade is a different thing from standing at the Street Fighter II machine. I can't promise that you'll love Treasure Arm, but I can promise that you'll never have played anything quite like it before. On a platform awash with retro hacks and match-three clones, that's almost as good.