I have spent a depressing amount of time this week playing Puzzle Inlay on the MSN Zone site. I was not alone.
I spent exactly one hour playing the deluxe download version, as that is all the time it gives you before you have to pay $19.95. My self esteem is sufficiently robust *not* to think this is a worthwhile, life-enhancing use of hard earned cash [GOOD], but my motivation is not sufficiently robust for me not to then spend a disgusting amount of time continuing to play the free online version with its inferior features and annoying habit of crashing IE every 20 minutes or so so you have to go back to the beginning [BAD].
But I digress. Basically, you pick up different shaped and sized pieces and fit them into an outline shape. The outline shapes get more complicated, and the pieces you get to fill the outline shapes come in thicker and faster so you have less time to think and make more mistakes, even as you get more proficient. You're never get better enough fast enough to cope with the increased speed of the game, and if you did play it enough for this to be the case, your wrists would start packing up. Pieces you pick up and then can't fit in you can dump, but they come straight back again.
It really is just like life.
But what's redeeming are the special tools you get. Every so often a piece comes along with a little twizzle in the middle of it, which gives you one of two things -- a star, which fills in a gap in your space which you don't have a piece for, and a hammer, which allows you to smash a piece you don't have a space for. If you are playing the deluxe version you might also get a transformer, which changes big unwieldy pieces into smaller, easier to handle pieces, or -- best of all when the going gets tough -- a break, which gives you a bit of time to fit in the pieces you already have before more arrive.
These are things you wish you had in your *real* life. Honest. Try it, but just not for too long. Go straight for deluxe and walk away after an hour...
joella
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