Thanks to Jeff’s sorcerous, seductive words, I picked up Puzzlejuice on the iTunes app store and have been playing the junk out of it for the past hour and a bit. It’s a combination of Tetris and a crossword puzzle paired together with great minimalist graphics. If you don’t think that sounds amazing, you can pack your bags and get the heck off my Internet.
To play Puzzlejuice you drag and orient blocks (a la Tetris) and when you get a certain amount of similar colored blocks together, you can tap on them and they transform into a random selection of letters which you have to scour for words (a la a crossword). The challenge is that you’re looking for these words while blocks fall from the sky and if they pile up too high, you lose. There are also a certain goals you have to meet, and words need to be above three letters (none of this “an” nonsense).
Puzzlejuice is the perfect iPhone game because it seems almost tailor made to be on the phone. It doesn’t try to shoe-horn in too much in the way of clumsy UI stuff and you can hop in for a quick round in one of its many modes, some with clever names like “European Extreme Mode”. It’s also very charming and has many winks towards nerd culture like naming the quit button “Rage Quit”.
There’s more iPhone gaming around here than usual, but with Infinity Blade II and Tiny Tower also dominating my time, and the fact that I got 100% of the achievements in Sonic Generations, I’m on my phone quite often. Has anyone else tried Puzzlejuice and if so what do you think of it? Are you tempted to give it a go?