infeCCt

infeCCt has a misleading title. It makes you think of viral outbreaks, doctors, and hospitals, but it's about nothing as scary as that.

In fact, it’s a straightforward puzzler in which you guide the vine of an unseen plant around a tiled grid in an effort to fill the available space.

You guide the vine around using the touchscreen in a manner reminiscent of Snake – the simplistic and addictive game that people played on Nokia phones hundreds and hundreds of years ago – in that you can’t travel across a tile you’ve already been on.

Impassable blocks make things trickier, while other obstacles are introduced in later levels. These include intersection tiles, over which the vine actually does have to pass twice, or coloured tunnels that act like portals, transporting the vine across the grid.

There’s always the chance of making a mistake, which is where the game’s useful 'undo' feature comes in.

You can retract the vine to any point just by tapping where you want to go back to. It subtracts points from your end of level score, but it doesn’t get much more punishing than that. There’s a ‘reveal solution’ button, which gives you a score of zero, but that’s as evil as this game gets.

Although infeCCt has been optimised for Xperia Play, allowing you to control the vine using the D-pad and undo using the X button, this feels almost superfluous. It’s much faster and more intuitive to use the touchscreen.

In most cases, not making use of the Play’s controls is a regrettable thing for its games to do. But in this case it makes perfect sense, since there really isn’t any need – infeCCt works just fine without them.

Probably the most appealing thing for puzzle geeks is the sheer number of levels included. There are 300 of the blighters, most of which offer at least a minute or so of pondering time.

Even if every single one only took you this long, that would mean five hours of puzzles in one tiny Android game. Quite a feat.

The only problem is that without introducing more obstacles and even greater problems as the game goes on infeCCt risks growing stale and boring.

Even after the first 30 or 40 puzzles you can feel the ennui kicking in, suggesting that this isn’t a game you could play a lot of in one sitting without growing a bit restless.

All in all, infeCCt may be a little dull as time goes on but the core game is solid, generous, and highly accessible.