Do you like Alexey Pajitnov’s timeless puzzler Tetris as much as you like succumbing to unrelenting waves of nausea? You’ll probably want to check out the new Flash-based sensation, First-Person Tetris. There’s not much of a learning curve, here — it operates pretty much exactly like the block-dropping puzzler you know and love, only with a small twist. We’ll let you figure it out for yourselves — why not give it a spin, provided you’ve got some free time (and a strong, strong stomach).

Little Wheel is a point-and-click adventure game which tells the story of a community of robots who had their power shut down due to a minor mishap. By chance a guard robot was brought back to life after getting struck by lightning, and it is up to the player to assist our mechanical friend as it tries to restore power back to the city.

Cutscenes are well-animated, puzzles are easy enough to solve without referring to a walkthrough, and all hot spots are marked clearly with either a gray or white circle. The only real fault to be found here is the length of the game, but even that is possibly down to how entertaining it is to play from start to end. (source: JayisGames)

Just released by Adam ‘Atomic‘ Saltsman for the benefit of indie devs everywhere: the Flixel engine, an open-source, fully featured, newly updated version of the Flash AS3 library Saltsman used for both his original web hit Gravity Hook, and the most recent Offworld-featured Fathom.

Flixel, which is meant to forgo the Flash IDE entirely, contains a number of improvements to how Flash handles 2D games, with support for spritesheets, baked in basic physics and particle effects, and the procedural map-generation code he used for the deep fathoms of Fathom.

You can dig through Flixel’s documentation via the official home site, and try Mode (above), the included de-Mo (see what he did there?) game that demonstrates the engine’s built-in features.

Flixel [AdamAtomic]

Breakout Panic is an arcade game that plays like all other Breakout clones, but in GameDesign’s version you are pressured to destroy all blocks as quickly as you can. Blocks are pushed downwards continuously, and the game ends immediately if you run out of balls to use or allow any block to cross the dashed line.

Left clicking releases all balls in your possession, and any balls still in play after you’ve completed a level will be carried forward to the next round. Bonus rounds appear every fifth stage as well, with the first type conferring bonus balls while the second reduces your spare ball count.

Power-ups include those that increases or reduces the size of the circle you are in control of, barriers, extra balls, and stars that boosts the travel speed of all balls.

In Shift 4 you’re in control of an astronaut whose ship was just attacked by a giant squid, forcing you to make an emergency landing at the closest planet. Waking up to find your family members missing, you decide to explore a deserted facility nearby and search for clues about their current whereabouts.

This particular episode is a little more challenging than previous releases, since players are required to switch between two or more characters often to solve some of the harder puzzles. New gameplay elements such as gravity and contact-sensitive switches are introduced at a steady pace, which is a boon considering that the map is a lot less linear and there is a bit of backtracking to do as well.

FATHOM, the latest collaboration of Adam “Atomic” Saltsman and Danny “B” Baranowsky, is your standard 2D action-platformer… or is it? The game throws some fun surprises your way, which I don’t want to spoil here, and is definite food for thought. I give it 33 thumbs up!

Like their hit Gravity Hook, FATHOM uses Adam’s Flixel framework for Flash-based 2D games to great effect. (The entire game took about 10 days to make.) Which is cool, because Flixel should see a public release “in a few weeks.” (!) There’s also a bunch of procedural trickery going on in the background which the player may not notice, but I think is worth mentioning in case Adam wants to talk about it more in the forum thread.

Suffice it to say: there’s considerable serenity packed deep within its outwardly militant core (a core guarded by, as you’ll see, this decade’s best flower-pot-security-bots), and a disquieting ending that its creator assures me shouldn’t sink my heart as much as it does.

If Saltsman’s name rings a bell it’s because — along with collaborators Infinite Ammo and Flashbang — he had a hand in designing recent Blurst release Paper Moon, as well as physics grappler Gravity Hook, the recently mentioned Dr. Dobbs promotional game, and the iPhone’s original word game best-seller Wurdle.

Saltsman’s pixels are effortlessly charming, his underlying concept — once you “get it” — is genuinely quite brilliant (here’s a hint, if you find yourself a little lost in the dark: the things around you? They’re trying to tell you something), and the game’s chiptune-prog score by Danny ‘dB Soundworks‘ Baranowsky (previously featured for his work on Flashbang’s Blush) works perfectly in concert with the rest to make a fantastic, thoughtful short-story of a game.

As a bonus, Saltsman and dB have given Offworld an exclusive track from Fathom‘s soundtrack, “Boss of Doooooom”, which you’ll recognize from the struggle pictured above. Stream it below, or download directly here.

Fathom [Adam Atomic, dB Soundworks]