Aqua Forest game combines drawing, physics

Of all the games you’re going to hear about on the iPhone in the coming days and weeks, Hudson Entertainment’s Aqua Forest is one of the most unusual and compelling. And at $7.99 it’s a veritable bargain, as it’s sure to take up plenty of your spare time.

The game relies on a physics engine and basic drawing tools. It features both a “free” mode that lets you draw what you want — you create objects of various shapes, with elastic properties, solid properties, plastic qualities, fluid and gas — and a “puzzle” mode, in which you use some of those tools, combined with the iPhone or iPod touch’s accelerometer, to solve puzzles — such as how to get fluid into a container, or how to get an object through a puzzle.

There are five categories with 10 puzzles each. Each puzzle is ostensibly a “tutorial” which teaches you some aspect of how the game’s clever physics engine works, introducing you first to tilting puzzles, then to puzzles that require you to touch some area to complete a task, drawing, warm and cool physics challenges, and then a set of all capabilities combined in ten super-challenging puzzles.