It's a puzzle game, but with cutscenes!

Khimera: Puzzle Island is a good example of how adding characters with strong personalities can spice up an otherwise-rote game design.

I mean, not to overly impugne Puzzle Island's roteness - it's got solid controls, and a large amount of puzzles - but it certainly doesn't have big enough grids or unique enough mechanics to stand out among your Pictopixes or your Voxelgrams.

What it does have is a cast of, uh, monster girls? who develop adorable friendships through a bizarre puzzle-filled misadventure.

Puzzle Island's "story" isn't taken seriously; cutscene dialog is filled with lighthearted gags and silly puns. The whole package is just fun, from the option to replace grid icons with hamburgers, to the loading screen's Loadin' notification.

There are some definite shortcomings in Puzzle Island, like the fact that most of its puzzles aren't even part of the "story" mode (a few large mosaics are split up into almost 200 small puzzles), and, while its soundtrack is pretty good!, each "stage" only has one track which inevitably becomes very repetitive.

But the quirky charm of these awkward monster girls really makes the game, and made me more than happy to click through even the most tedious of their puzzles.

... oh, and there is one pretty neat mechanic in the final boss battle, using rapid-fire timed puzzles to implement attacking and defending. I kinda hope that a sequel explores this idea some more.

Better than: PictoQuest: The Cursed Grids
Not as good as: Piczle Cross Adventure
Different, but basically as good as: Murder by Numbers