A Virus Named TOM

The title doesn't give much away, but what you have is a puzzle game. It involves turning tiles to create a circuit with the aim of lighting up the entire board. There's a story to set the scene; a scientist is seeking revenge after being fired by a corporation, so he creates a virus named Tom who can infect their mechanical inventions and take them down.

You can only move in four directions since you are navigating on a grid. In order to rotate tiles, you hold a button down and move around two sides of the tile which turns it in the direction of Tom's movement.

At first, the puzzles are pretty straight-forward, but as you progress through the levels, you are introduced to more concepts which ramp up the difficulty. Each puzzle is a race against the clock to complete, and the timer is represented by Tom's energy bar which depletes further on contact with enemies.

On some levels, there are some anti-virus creatures that patrol parts of the grid that damage you, but you can remove certain types of these, at least temporarily with your glitch bombs. The patrol routes are nothing more than straight lines on the grid, so they are obviously predicable in their movement.

Certain levels have tiles where you can only see them when a circuit passes through them. This involves a bit of trial and error, turning the tiles until this happens. After you know what the tile looks like, you can try and match it with surrounding tiles and attempt to plan ahead, partially relying on a bit of memorisation. There's also certain sections that are locked down so you have to plan around these areas and work out the best point that the current should flow into and out of this area.

Ultimately, the game has a large part of planning and a large part of trial and error which can all be a bit mind-bending. It's much harder than that though when you have the anti-viruses patrolling the area; so you are trying to think whilst reacting to the patrolling enemies. This can lead to very frustrating levels.

You will frequently find yourself in situations where the puzzle almost seems complete, but then you realise you have in-fact messed up, so then have to take time undoing your solution. Chances are though, you will run out of time, so you just have to restart the puzzle from the start.

You can skip a limited amount of levels, and if you choose to skip them, you can always go back and complete the level which returns the skip token back to you.

A Virus Named Tom is a decent game. Some puzzle fans will love it, but some won't. If you like taking your time to contemplate the solution, then this probably isn't the right game for you. It relies on a bit of trial and error and is a race against the clock which ends up leading to too much frustration for my liking.