Flash Motor Karen (PSP)

I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows of Sokoban or Boxxle or one of the other names of the ancient shoving boxes onto certain spots-type of puzzle game. Flash Motor Karen plays kind of like a more complicated, but simultaneously more forgiving version of those games.
Each stage is a small area with a switch and a door. The object is to press the switch, then get to the door. You can take as many steps as you like getting to the switch, but each stage has a limit on how many steps can be taken between pressing the switch and getting to the door. So, in puzzle mode at least, there are two main kinds of stages: ones which introduce the player to a new concept, in which the puzzle to solve is usually getting to the switch, allowing the player more leeway in learning how to interact with the new element, and the main kind, in which the player is given

elements they have seen before, and the main challenge of the stage is to set up a path to get from the switch to the door in as few moves as possible.
There's also a story mode, chapters of which are gradually unlocked as you make your way through puzzle mode, which, as well as telling a story (entirely in Japanese, of course, and thankfully skippable), also adds another type of stage. The third type of stage has enemy robots walking around the map, who act in a roguelike-style manner, only moving when the player moves. In these stages, the aim is to "trick" the robots into moving into a square adjacent to your own, so they can be dispatched with a press of the O button. Conversley, moving into a square adjacent to one of the robots will result in the player's death.

Flash Motor Karen is a pretty good game, and unlike many puzzle games of this type, never feels impossibly hard (though there are hard puzzles, I've yet to be stuck on one for more than 10-15 minutes, nor did I ever feel that the solution was totally beyond my reach). Though this might mean that the game is offensively easy for hardened sokoban fans. (Sokofans?)

Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi (X Box 360)

The X Box Live Indie Games marketplace has a pretty bad reputation, thanks to the millions of games about chatting up girls, and trillions of games with titles containing some combination of the words "zombie", "craft", "epic" and "pixel". But among all of those, there are a few gems to be sought out. I've probably made a bad decision by choosing this one to write about first, since it's definitely my favourite game on the entire XBLIG

marketplace.
In it, you play as a young girl who was enjoying a nice day at the hot springs with her dad, when suddenly, the bottom of the spring gives way, and dad's sucked down into a pit full of malicious ducks and monkeys. Obviously, Chieri is compelled to jump into the pit and save her dad, armed only with a squirt bottle and a rabbit. The least likely of these two weapons, the rabbit, is the gimmick on which the game hangs. All over the screen, there are flashing "hooks", similar to those seen in ChainDive, onto which the rabbit can grab (an action performed by the player pressing and holding A), with Chieri hanging on by a chain. While attatched to a hook (or even an enemy!), pushing the analogue stick will make Chieri lean in the direction pushed, shooting bullets from her squirt bottle in the opposite direction.
There's a few types of enemies in the game: Ducks, who paddle along the bottom of the screen in groups, monkeys, who float down from above in wooden buckets, and revolving turret-things that stay in one place. There's also bosses who appear every now and then, in the form of giant floating meatbuns with an increasing number of smaller meatbuns orbiting it. The bullets the enemies fight are turned into harmless fruit when they pass through the chain, and the fruit all instantly fly towards Chieri when the chain is released. Collecting a

certain amount of fruit earns an extra life, with the amount increasing everytime it's reached. But, as the game goes along, the enemies gradually get more enthusiastic in shooting larger amounts of bullets that be cancelled into fruit. So it all works out in the end, which is nice.
Anyway, I've already said that I love this game, so obviously I recommend it, especially since it's only about 70p. Searching for Japanese games on the XBLIG marketplace is a pain, tough, so just buy it on the xbox site here and have it appear on your console's download queue. The developers also have a website here, and it appears they mostly make fangames using characters from existing series, like Cardcaptor Sakura, Lilith from the Darkstalkers series.