Oddy Smog's Misadventure

The higher the number of games on iPhone and iPod touch, the more games that ask you reach loftier heights.

Doodle Jump is the most obvious example, but it's by no means the most creative.

Oddy Smog's Misadventure follows a rebellious clump of smog's efforts to escape from an encroaching mass of the stuff. Black fumes billowing up the insides of a chimney are a good motivation to find higher ground.

Spend too much time in its depths and it's Game Over.

As you might expect, your aim is to climb as high as you can as quickly as you can by leaping between a series of spinning cogs as you make your way up the chimney.

Holding down an invisible button on the right of the screen causes Oddy to cling to any spinning cogs in range. A similarly obscured button on the left gives our sooty friend a mid-air jump, albeit only one per mini-flight.

Climbing becomes a case of combining the two, dancing from one cog to the next and using Oddy's ability to clamber up the walls a vital couple of inches to get you higher and higher.

The trickiest aspect is determining just when to let go. Releasing your finger from the invisible pad on the right results in Oddy flinging himself into the air and, hopefully, slap bang onto the next cog.

What makes it difficult, though, is that your flings are determined by the spin of the cog itself, rather than the direction Oddy is facing, making it difficult to avoiding flinging yourself sideways or, even worse, down.

As such, restarts aplenty are in order here and even when you do make it up into the upper echelons things have a habit of getting fiddly.

Helpful cogs that rocket you upwards several stories and mini UFOs that send you soaring are counterbalanced by the sheer complexity involved in leaping between cogs that get farther apart from each other.

It's almost as if the game is willing you to fail, with the split second decisions required to ensure you don't end up falling to your death especially taxing on the little grey cells the longer you play.

Whether Oddy's daring dash for freedom – which sadly comes without any leaderboards, just a tweeting option – is for you or not depends on just how well you handle the controls.

Manage to conquer the controls and Oddy Smog's Misadventure is a smart, charming little climber. Fail consistently, however, and play gets very dark, very, very quickly.