Stay Alight!

Stay Alight! is a physics-based puzzler in the vein of Angry Birds - no, wait, come back. It's fine.

It's gorgeous, for starters, with a gloriously off-kilter visual style. More importantly, though, it's a game that takes the familiar projectile-tossing template and attempts to give it a twist all of its own.

You're a tiny, bulb-headed warrior, charged with ridding the world of grim little microbes using a variety of different orbs. Delightfully, that world is our own, albeit seen from an ant's-eye perspective, with Stay Alight!'s generous bounty of stages stacked high with casually discarded relics of human consumption.

Tin cans, rubber ducks, and weathered dolls lay strewn across the ground, all brought to eerie life through a gloomy, detailed aesthetic that complements the game's maudlin score to create an experience that's far from the norm for this kind of physics-based puzzler.

It’s a fantastical world, but - sadly - not one entirely matched by Stay Alight!'s rather more traditional gaming core.

Stay Alight! uses a familiar touch-and-drag setup to adjust the throwing angle and velocity of the microbe-obliterating orbs at your disposal and, initially at least, the game fails to claw itself from the shadow of Rovio's avian phenomenon.

Each roving microbe is defeated either with a direct hit or by maneouvring an object into it, and levels are cleared by destroying them all. Things start off very predictably - but, thankfully, they quickly improve.

In Stay Alight!, projectiles are directly affected by the game world, bouncing off ceilings and springing off walls. It's not long before this seemingly inconsequential twist becomes vital for progress.

Canny level design delights in placing microbes far out of reach, and soon you're forced to rely on deflection, perfecting your angle of attack and then watching as your orbs ricochet across the level like a high tech game of bagatelle.

It's a setup that demands a surprisingly cerebral approach to proceedings as you scrutinise your environment and formulate a plan of attack. The result is a game that proves plenty satisfying when victory is finally yours - particularly given that devious layouts and limited orb stocks make for an unexpectedly tricky challenge.

Later stages introduce a few other kinks, including buttons to activate and secondary bulb heads for additional support - provided you orb them to life first. Incidentally, orbs come in different colours with their own distinct characteristics.

Red orbs, for instance, split apart on impact, while blue orbs explode in a four-point formation. Orbs are dished out in a set pattern, meaning you have to carefully consider the order in which you tackle the microbes.

A few extra touches - including collectible jigsaw pieces that fill in what little backstory there is - aim to differentiate Stay Alight! from other games of its ilk, but it's the subtle formula twists and distinctive ambience that help elevate the experience.

Sadly, though, those twists aren't quite enough to stop wearying repetition from setting in - and, ultimately, you're left with a quirky, beautiful, physics-based puzzler that could have shone a little brighter.