Meat Factory

Left, right, splat!

Those three words pretty much sum up the Meat Factory experience in its entirety.

It's a casual action game that narrowly escapes a pounding for its staggering simplicity - partly through charm, and partly because it's easier to play another game than it is to quit.

You play frenzied meat packer Fred, who works a thankless job dealing with the products of a grim pie-making machine.

This infernal piece of machinery squishes a literal production line of cute animals into mulch. Think Bertha's evil twin sister.

Saving these creatures is a straight forward matter of running left and right along the machine's grisly conveyor belt, with virtual controls mapped to the corresponding side of the screen.

When you run over a creature, you automatically pick it up. Then you need to run back to the far left of the screen, where the creature will be safely deposited.

Meat Factory's challenge comes from the variety of contraptions that seek to squish the animals - and you. The main obstacles are five tenderisers that stamp down at random from the top of the screen, but soon you'll face laser beams and buzz saws.

You can unlock new power suits with unique attributes by meeting various criteria - dying 25 times (that's easy), or collecting every last animal type, for example.

The unique point to this is, whenever you quit out of the game and the device memory is cleared, your progress is reset.

This means that if you want to unlock that Super Bunny Fred power suit, which makes all the animals follow you, you'll have to do so in a single sitting.

Meat Factory is a return to the gameplay and values of Nintendo's old Game & Watch contraptions, then, which is both its charm and its downfall.

The directness and simplicity of the game is bracingly refreshing, but it also makes the game feel like a novelty widget.

With no real sense of progression across gameplay sessions, or the usual social highscore structure, Meat Factory will feel too sparse to many. But there's no doubting its simple, squishy pleasures.