BlindGiRl
 
    * Developer: GLPeas
    * Format: Xbox Live Indie Games
    * Price: 80 Microsoft Points (£0.64)
 
This thoroughly sinister maze game has you guiding the titular BlindGiRl through a world of darkness on the way to finding musical notes. It's less Pac-Man, more Alone In The Dark, with added misery and chilling paranoia.
 
Unable to physically see your surroundings, you're forced to rely on your sensory understanding of soundwaves and the way they propagate your environment.
 
Represented by a pair of footprints, you walk around in search of clues to direct you to the next note, and can 'see' the walls around you via the red soundwaves which ripple around the walls with greater velocity and amplitude depending on how fast you walk.
 
As tremendously unusual as the play mechanics are at first, navigation quickly becomes intuitive as you pace the darkened corridors in search of clues, while avoiding the attention of lurking beasts. Attracted by the sound of your footsteps, you learn to tentatively lure them out before giving them the slip with graceful tip-toeing silence.
 
Collecting notes eventually has gameplay implications, allowing you to play back the song and fill the world with green soundwaves, revealing otherwise hidden waypoints which help guide you through the correct exit.
 
With its unnerving atmosphere, stylish minimalism and unique premise, BlindGiRl is another sterling example of why the Indie Channel is proving to be a fertile arena for artistic expression.
 
8/10

Soul
 
    * Developer: Kydos Studio
    * Format: Xbox Live Indie Games, iPhone / iPod Touch
    * Price: 80 Microsoft Points (£0.64) on Xbox Live, £1.19 on the App Store  
 
The stark finality of a flat-lining ECG machine makes a chilling introduction to this artful probe into the afterlife from Kydos Studio. Floating formlessly above your own lifeless cadaver, your death is just the beginning as you take control of your soul.
 
Represented as a glowing blob of light, your aim is to try and negotiate your soul through the cruel twists and turns of demon-filled hospital corridors on the way to eventually finding a safe passage to heaven itself. High concept or what?
 
Essentially an arty version of the old steady-hand buzz-wire game you might find at school fêtes, Soul sets you the principal aim of getting through each screen without touching any obstacles. On the iPhone this involves tilting your way through each environment, while the Xbox 360 version (found on the Indie Channel) relies on the more traditional control stick method.
 
Either way, success relies upon an unerringly steady hand and a modicum of trial and error as you avoid the chomping jaws of death as they leap mercilessly from the walls of your surroundings.
 
As you progress, the locations and hazards become increasingly unconventional and challenging. One room tasks you with outrunning a flood as it overtakes a room, while another sees you trapped inside the belly of the beast, winding through his pulsing intestines before eventually escaping out of his rectum. Pleasant.
 
But possibly the most savage test of all comes right at the end, as you traverse a lightning-strewn storm, dodging the precipitous clouds on the way to the eternal sunshine that streams through heaven's gates.
 
Soul is a deeply beautiful experience at times, not unlike Flower, although at the polar opposite end of the scale for relaxation. It's fiddly, taxing, and often hellishly frustrating in its demand for ultimate precision, but somehow also hugely engaging and addictive. For the price, it's well worth investigating, if only to show support for the spirit of adventure shown in these indie gaming experiments.
 
8/10

Rocket Racing (a.k.a Halfbrick Rocket Racing)
 
    * Developer: Halfbrick
    * Formats: PSP minis, Xbox Live Indie Games
    * Price: £3.49 on PSN, 240 Microsoft Points (£2.04) on Xbox Live
 
Top-down racing is a sure-fire formula if you can get it right, but it's also tough to come up with something that hasn't been done to death. Rocket Racing's futuristic take on this oversubscribed sub-genre takes an interesting approach, with inertia-based mechanics that are simple enough to explain, but inordinately tricky to master.
 
The premise couldn't reasonably be any more straightforward: you guide a rocket ship around a series of tracks and circuits and try to complete the objective. The tricky part is coping with a steering system best described as exacting, and a ham-fisted approach is likely to send you careening into the nearest wall.
 
Light taps on the boost and deft adjustments to the steering are the order of the day, as you try to plot a course that hits all the boost zones while avoiding those which slow you down.
 
Rocket Racing offers further assistance by allowing you to zip gracefully around the track by 'grinding' off the sides. As you steer into a corner, if your rocket boost hits the side at just the right angle, you get a little extra lift, allowing you to get the jump on your opponents.
 
It's a perilously tricky mechanic to master, but once you get a feel for what's required you can start to plot the most effective routes. It takes time, though, because each course requires such a deft touch that only endless practice will win the day. Its exacting nature has the capacity to be more than a little frustrating, but patience is a virtue in Rocket Racing.
 
Fortunately, it's not all about racing. To add a much-needed layer of variety, campaign mode throws in challenges which mix up your ability to hit checkpoints with your grinding skill - all against the clock, of course. Eventually, progress through the six tiers hangs on a mini Grand Prix where you race against three other AI racers, just in case you were starting to get cocky. With pass-the-pad multiplayer, as well as standalone Grand Prix and Quick Race modes, Rocket Racing certainly isn't short on content.
 
If you're the kind of person who eats F-Zero for breakfast, Rocket Racing is a brutally enjoyable take on the top-down racer, but maybe a little too punishing for its own good on occasion.
 
7/10

Shoot 1UP
 
    * Developer: Mommy's Best Games
    * Format: Xbox Live Indie Games
    * Price: 80 Microsoft Points (£0.64)
 
One of the more impressively polished efforts to hit the Xbox Live Indie scene, Shoot 1UP is an enjoyable twist on the classic top-down shmup for a mere 80 Microsoft Points, which is less money than you probably spend on a can of Coke (unless you're like Tom and drink 14 a day).
 
Notable for being yet another videogame to sport a female boss with disturbing projectile-emitting gazongas, it manages to entertain for the requisite 15 minutes thanks to the novelty of allowing players to utilise their entire fleet of ships on the screen at once.
 
Rather than rely on standard power-ups, you tread a risk-reward tightrope as you elect to either spread your fleet's firepower across the screen with the right trigger, or contract them into a narrow column and minimise your exposure to enemy firepower.
 
Destroying enemy waves periodically grants you extra lives, but rather than going into storage they instantly join in the fight. Avoid enemy fire for long enough and up to 30 ships will be available to you, granting you a vast column of devastation. Its technically impressive, too, with a chaotic early-nineties SWIV vibe without a hint of slowdown.
 
Unlike most Xevious-inspired shooters, the presence of four difficulty levels ensures that it's instantly accessible right from the off, though the kind of players who go to bed dreaming of exploding sprites are also well catered for.
 
With a two-player co-op mode and branching paths across all five stages, it'd almost be rude for shooter aficionados not to destroy the mechanical-tentacle hybrid forces responsible for your pain.
 
8/10