Just one more puzzle, then I’ll write the review. Well…maybe two. Three, tops!

This test of my willpower comes to you courtesy of The Amazing Brain Train, by Grubby Games. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The Story
The Amazing Brain Train was invented by Professor Fizzwizzle and uses brain power as fuel. The more puzzles you can solve before your time expires, the higher your point yield and the farther you can travel.

Apparently, the professor lives in an idyllic land inhabited by animals who talk (text) to you in quest mode (more on that later), but are otherwise silent. They are prominently featured in most of the minigames where you would need to separate them into groups in a grassy field, identify which animal hadn’t been in the barn on the previous screen, direct them to fruit found on picnic blankets laid on an icy plain, or maneuver the blocks they’re standing on so they all fit into the spaceship. Erm…spaceship?!?

Okay, so the story is fairly thin, and some of the premises behind the minigames follow a completely different theme than the others. Luckily, the story isn’t required to have fun with this game.

The Environment
In this day and age of high definition TV and lifelike 3-D rendering, the cute-but-simple animation of Brain Train looks decidedly 1990s. The tolerable midi synth music feels dated as well. Thankfully, hitting mute doesn’t interfere with game play one bit.

Game Play
Once you create a user account (you can have several on one computer) there are 15 minigame puzzles that can be played in Practice Mode (timed or unlimited), Test Mode, or Quest Mode. The minigames are split into 5 categories: Search, Planning, Spatial, Memory, and Numbers. When starting, you have access to only 10 of the minigames. The remaining 5 (1 in each category) need to be unlocked, which is achieved by obtaining a milestone, such as a certain score in one of the other games in the category.

Practice Mode allows you commitment-free play time. Choose any unlocked game to play with or without a time limit. At the end of your timed game, you will see your numerical score and an animation of your brain performing the carnival strength test of ringing the bell with a sledgehammer. The stronger scores will cause the brain to dent the bell, or even knock the bell clean off the pedestal, which I never tire of seeing. Rankings of “Your Best Scores” and “Best Scores on this Computer” let you know how well you’ve done, relatively. You can also submit your score to the online leader boards to see how you compare with the world at large.

Test Mode will choose one unlocked game from each of the 5 categories for you to play, with a time limit. After each game, you will see your numerical score and the brain ringing the bell with the sledgehammer animation. At the end of the 5 games, you get a summary of the numerical score you received in each category, a numerical total of the 5 scores, a letter “Test Grade,” how far your brain power carried the train in miles and kilometers, and roughly how far that mileage translates between two points on the globe (such as the distance between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Dubai, UAE). This summary page also helpfully points out your all-time best distance, as well as your total distance traveled to date and a lovely trivial fact (eg, "that’s more than the diameter of the Earth"). It seems like overkill on the metrics, and the whole “brain power = train distance” thing still feels like a stretch here, but where else could you unwittingly pick up the information that there’s 4048 miles between Sao Paulo, Brazil and Timbuktu, Mali?

In Quest Mode, you get to perform tasks for the animals that live in the “village” (comprised of a large area including mountains, desert, beaches, and forests) by traveling back and forth in the Brain Train, collecting or delivering items or messages. You communicate with the animals by clicking on them and reading what they have to say in the text bar at the top of the screen. Once you identify your destination, you click on the “Travel” button to play a puzzle of the computer’s choosing. The higher a score on the puzzle, the farther your train can travel. (Aha! NOW it makes sense!) However, while completing 5 puzzles in Test Mode sent the train hurtling thousands of kilometers, solving 1 puzzle in Quest Mode is only good for 4 or 5 measly kilometers at best. I cry “foul!” As you solve the quests, you can unlock pieces of track, which can allow you to travel between animals more quickly.

Achievements
In addition to unlocking new minigames or getting high scores on the leader boards, players can try to win “Trophies” for various things as specific as “achieving a score of 20,000 or more in Birthday Cake Shuffle without ever moving the professsor,” or as general as “completing 1 quest in Quest Mode.” With 32 trophies to earn, there’s more than enough to keep you busy for a while.

The Puzzles
Ahhh…we’ve come to the most important feature for this puzzle game addict—the puzzles themselves. This is where The Amazing Brain Train shines. The puzzles are interesting, challenging, and addictive.
As I mentioned, the games fall under 5 categories: Search, Planning, Spatial, Memory, and Numbers.

Search games :
Critter Crammer. You need to fit animals, who are sitting on differently-shaped blocks, into a grid on a spaceship. Think of Tetris without being able to rotate the pieces. It’s harder than you’d think.
Birthday Cake Shuffle. The professor and his animal friends are in a small room for a birthday celebration. Slide the animals, still on their blocks, out of the way so the professor can get to the cake.
Separation Safari. Maneuver a rope between two tent stakes to separate the two groups of animals who apparently aren’t getting along.

Planning games:
Frozen Fruit Finder. You need to guide the monkey over the frozen pond to collect the fruit that is inexplicably laid out on picnic blankets around the pond. She can only travel in straight lines, and can only stop to change directions after collecting a fruit.
Sunbeam Savior. Several poor koalas are scattered around the icy plains. Luckily the professor has a heat beam and mirrors you can set up to bounce the beam around obstacles to reach the koalas and keep them warm. Who thinks up this stuff?
Super Shapes. You need to organize the symbols into groups of 3, grouped by color, number, or shape. You need to plan ahead, though, to make sure the last group of 3 also share an attribute or the board will reset.

Spatial games:
Puppy Dog Tangle. Untangle the professor and his dogs by moving them until the leashes don’t intersect.
Cosmic Cubes. A geometric figure made of colored cubes rotates on screen. The professor is looking at one side of the figure (and rotating with it). Figure out which of 4 options matches the view that the professor sees.
Mouse Maze. Lead a mouse through a hedge maze to get to the cheese at the end.

Memory games:
Newcomer. Animals, symbols, and numbers are hanging out in the barn. Get a good look at them, then click the mouse. The doors close, then reopen showing the objects you’ve seen in a different order, and with a new animal, symbol, or number. Identify the newcomer. Ironically, it seems that the longer I play, the worse I get at this one.
Moonlight Memory. Memorize the pattern connecting the stars in the sky, then recreate the pattern you saw.
Rotation Riddles. On a stage, memorize the direction each animal is facing. Click, and a box drops over the animals. The boxes then rotate, and a spotlight lights one box. Click to show which direction that animal is now facing.

Numbers games:
Pond Sum. Jump your frog from one numbered lily pad to the next so the total of all the jumped-upon lily pads adds up to the goal number. This takes planning as well as math skills.
Brain Ball. Answer simple math equations as quickly as you can. When you answer, the monkey pitches, and the professor hits the ball. What equations have to do with baseball is anyone’s guess.
Monkey Mayhem. Memorize the number of monkeys traveling into, out of, or between bushes. Answer how many monkeys are in the bush specified by an arrow. This can quickly become difficult as the number of bushes increases.

The Brain Train folks get bonus points for allowing us to customize keyboard controls for each minigame.

Because the games start out easy, then increase in difficulty as time goes on, this game appealed to the 6-year-old as well as the grown-ups of the household. There’s nothing like the joy you hear in your son’s voice “Mommy! I beat your high score!” to bring out the competitive streak in you. Whether you want to obsessively earn the Clever Completist trophy (for earning every other trophy), or you just want to drop in for a quick bout of koala-warming, this delightful puzzle game will keep your interest for a while.

Now, to see if I can shave a few seconds off my Mouse Maze runs with some keyboard tweaks...