Velcro Mind

Action 1995 Dos Jazz Software Arcade style Top down

Hypnotic puzzling experience

If you like your games abstract, bonkers or just plain quirky, then this little known puzzler might be right up your alley. As with the best such games, like Tetris or E-Motion, the concept is simple enough to grasp but tricky to master and although this isn't a complete success, it's certainly worthy of some investigation by genre fans. The player controls a disc and which is divided into four different colours, each of which corresponds with a ball and a hand which occupy the playing field. Your goal is to catch the ever bouncing balls by rotating the disk so that both disk and ball match, and then deliver the ball to the static hand of the appropriate colour. If you fail to make the proper connection, you take a hit and lose a life. Lose twelve and it's game over. That's pretty much it in terms of gameplay but while it may be simple, Velcro Mind is a surprisingly compelling little game. There's no real point to any of it, other to test your patience and your skills but it makes for an elegant little time waster that has a similar sort of appeal to Pipe Dreams and Columns and other such abstract games. This one isn't going to win any awards for its visuals, which are about as straightforward as they come, but as with all similar games, this isn't really a problem as they fulfill their role perfectly and without flash or clutter. The real problem with Velcro Mind as that it doesn't really take that long to master so it lacks the long-term appeal of true classics but while the fun lasts it is strangely hypnotic and it's easy to lose track of time.

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