Chewing the brains of the chief Teenage Zombie: InLight's Darren McGrath

You don't need to look very far to see that DS games are going very casual, very fast. Everything from Me and My Horse to Imagine: Fashion Designer and Paint by DS demonstrates developers and publishers are now looking to create games for a very different type of gamer.

But do such games have to be so obvious in terms of their aspirations?

Well, if the title of its first DS game is anything to go by, Canadian developer InLight Entertainment half agrees. After all, you'll roughly know what you're going to get if you buy Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys!.

Behind the evocative title though, the game's details are imaginative. Take, for example, the three playable – if undead – characters. Lefty Lopez is a one-armed basketball player, who can jump, punch and bolt gadgets onto her stump. Half Pipe Boyd has replaced his legs with a skateboard (a tragic accident), meaning he can zoom around, do tricks and get through small gaps. Finally, Fins Magee's corpse has merged with various sea creatures, gaining him tentacles on his back – useful for climbing walls and using ropes.

Put that in your pipe and choke on it, straight-laced My Life Coach.

Intrigued, Pocket Gamer caught up with InLight's veep of creative development, Darren McGrath, to find out more.

Darren McGrath: I've always really enjoyed horror movies, even as a young kid. Some of the unintentionally bad ones can be just as fun as the good ones. Applying a comic book twist to the campy B-movie genre felt like a great starting point for Teenage Zombies.

We talked about a number of different game types as we were developing the characters. The key thing to remember is that while the game is laid out in a platformer-style, it's got a lot of puzzle-based elements. The way that Mike (our designer) has structured the use of the power-ups in particular, reflects this approach.

We've had a great deal of experience working with some pretty high profile characters and properties [including Buzz Lightyear and Pooh Bear]. Applying the same sensibilities to our own characters was a fairly natural progression. The attributes of the main characters that were necessary in order for the gameplay to work grew organically. It's difficult to separate character from story from game.

The characters appear throughout the more linear aspects [the 30 inter-level 'comics']. They also appear together on screen for most of the game. We felt that to be able to borrow the strengths from each one individually was both interesting and manageable from a player's perspective.

There are a number of ways to move through the worlds, however the unique attributes of a specific character in a specific scenario will certainly offer the player more optimal results. There are some pretty cool puzzles!

It's unique! The characters, the look of the background treatments, the comic-book presentation, the tongue-in-cheek humour and of course… great gameplay. I think this game will truly stand out.