Sliding about on a bedrock of blancmange, moving past boulder-sized strawberry slices and mountains of pink-tipped whipped cream, I pinball myself off chunks of milk chocolate straight into a gooey, molten vat of the stuff. The strange but friendly creatures lounging at the sides appraise me silently, unconcerned that I didn’t get the memo that it was Giant Fruit-Shaped Hat Day – I am shamelessly sporting a snorkel and a nightcap – and sigh contently. I’m a little envious as they slip a little further into their delicious hot tub.
I spend the next ten minutes or so doing a whole lot of nothing much. Phogs! – a sweet, if peculiar, puzzler that stars an elasticated, two-headed dog (now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write) – doesn’t intervene. Like my hot tub companions, its calm and unhurried, content just to wait for me to noodle about and work it out on my own. I know pulling the (marshmallow) cork free from the (chocolate) cauldron up above must have done something but… ah! Wait! I didn’t know I could grab onto this fountain!
Phogs! is full of those “ah!” moments. Mostly it’s exclaimed in delight, incited by the whimsy of it’s sweet, dreamy environments and sharp puzzling, and sometimes it’s uttered through clenched teeth like a curse word. This, my friends, is a physics game, where you can solve a puzzle properly, bumble your way through and cheese it, or end up sacking it off entirely because you’ve wedged yourself between a jammy dodger water wheel and a giant Victoria Sandwich cliff-face.
