Fiendish puzzler Fading Shadows rolls exclusively towards PSP

It's a rare game that has you rolling a ball around a screen and isn't good. Just like top-down viewed Micro Machines style racing, it's simply a concept that can't fail. PSP already has two obscenely good games of its type in the shape of Mercury Meltdown and LocoRoco, and it looks like it's about to get another come February 2008.

Lithuania-based developer Ivolgamus UAB has announced Fading Shadows, its ball rolling puzzle game with a bit of a difference. For starters, its control system doesn't put you in direct control of the ball itself, or of tilting the world it's in. Instead, you control a beam of light, which has a gravitational pull on the ball.

A video released to coincide with the game's announcement (watch it here) shows a player navigating several puzzles within the game's 40 levels and solving these by widening and narrowing the beam of ligh. Or even turning it into different materials, such as wood and glass, in order to push switches and pass through water.

The organic settings of the levels shown, combined with the architecture-based puzzles with tricky platforms to navigate and switches to reach give it the slight look of a Tomb Raider game, with the obvious difference of the main protagonist consisting of just one sphere.

Actually, it's not strictly a ball but an orb containing the trapped soul of a young boy who needs steering to safety. Perhaps the less said about the game's plot, the better.

Importantly though, Fading Shadows is sounding really quite intriguing. As well as the single-player mode, there's a multiplayer offering with ten unique levels promised. We'll keep an eye on it – while we're waiting for LocoRoco 2 to appear, this could certainly plug a spherical shaped gap in our lives.