Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Developer: Razorback Devlopment
System: DS
Genre: Puzzle
Release date: Available now
Review by: Duane Simer

Riding the tide of the recent popularity of brain teasing and puzzle-style games is Brain Voyage, a title designed to test the logic, memory and deductive abilities of its players. Basically a large suite of games and puzzles with varying levels of difficulty, Brain Voyage takes creative mind benders from a myriad of cultures and offers them up as a collection of clever, challenging and original activities.

There are several ways to access these games from the menu. The main mode, World Tour, consists of traveling the world to complete puzzles from various countries, and earning bronze, silver, or gold medals to mark the speed or accuracy of achievement. Second in line is Random Play, which surprises the player with a random puzzle. There’s also the Puzzle Bank, where players can store previously played puzzles for later use. Finally, the DS Download and Play feature allows other players to download specific puzzles. Though not a multiplayer function, it allows the transfer of games between multiple DS units.

At the beginning of the World Tour game, a gentleman named Dr. Reiner Knizia enters the screen and introduces himself, offering to take the player on a journey. Upon acceptance, players are treated to a map of the world and a choice of where to begin. The world map is dotted with red and green circles that identify potential travel locations. On arrival, each activity is preceded by a short tutorial.

In addition to medals, there’s money to be earned and used to buy one’s way into more difficult iterations of each puzzle. There are multiple ways in which the difficulty of the puzzle is increased, and the variation depends entirely upon the type of puzzle. An example of this is a game called Train Spotting, in which two trains scroll by, one above the other. You must quickly discern the differences between them and tap the bottom car once for each difference noted. At the higher difficulty levels, the cars are no longer directly lined up, making comparisons more difficult and direct correlations tougher to identify.

While Brain Voyage borrows concepts from games like Minesweeper, it does come packed with some very original puzzles. For example, there’s a math challenge in which two equations are shown with missing arithmetic symbols, and the player must fill them in correctly to make them equal.

Another interesting twist on a common game has the player navigate a maze with only a spotlight view of a small portion that moves with the player. As this one gets more difficult, the spotlight gets smaller, and I found myself having to remember what the maze looked like while trying to avoid the traps that seemed ridiculously simple when I was able to see more, but were now rather deceptive, considering I had little to no advanced visual warning of their presence.

Brain Voyage has a lot of content when you consider all of the puzzles and their levels of difficulty. It also has the lasting appeal of such hopelessly addictive games as Minesweeper and Tetris. Complete that with the ability to save your favorites for later play and share them with others, and you might never put your DS down again.