Spring Time lspringtimeo

Springtime is here, but it‘s certainly not for Hitler and Germany. Your mission: control a little geezer, viewed top-down, over a multi-roatating checkerboard-patterned play area. Each part of the board is hinged in a manner that allows it to be rotated over all the three geometrical axes, x, y, and z.

The aim is to twist the board so that you can line up a spring with a cross. It sounds simple, but thinking in three dimensions can be taxing until you get used to it, and to compound the matter a timer counts down from 99 to zero. If you don’t finish in time, you lose a life.

And then, just as competence seems to be taking hold, the game springs more taxing puzzles on you. For example, some tiles can only be walked on once and, if said tile is to rotate the set-up another way, the restart option has to be triggered. This resets the board to the original position, but doesn’t reset the clock. So truly frantic to-ing and fro-ing takes place.

Fiendishly, as further progress is made, sliding tiles come into play. Apoplexy and involuntary alopecia (look it up) can result, even when the Help option is used to hint at the first few moves you should make.

Springtime is tremendous fun and a game that every puzzle addict should have in their collection. This is a demo version. The full Shareware game can be obtained from Trecision (full address on disk) in Italy for the nominal fee of US$10 (about £6).