Format: iPhone, iPod Touch
Developer: Austen Chongpison
Direct App Store link

"Welcome Religious!"

Hello. Religious here – that’s my name as far as iTunes 9 is concerned, anyway, greeting me accordingly every time I load it up. Why not? After all, if you’re looking to compound the creepiness of a piece of software addressing you as if you were a ID-stickered attendee at the Minneapolis Spoon Convention, you might as well have it get your name wrong in the process, just to ensure that there’s no doubt at all that a) machines already have taken over and b) unlike Skynet, they didn’t bother to become self-aware before they did so. It’s good to see the turtle-necked trendsetters down Cupertino way have been busy.

Another thing with which Apple has been busy, however, is enabling Genius recommendations for apps themselves, which is how I found Super Hard Puzzle, a spatial reasoning challenge from Austen Chongpison, which will cost you nothing in terms of money, but may well eat away at the soft fabric of your life until you find yourself walking into swift-moving traffic, eyes rimmed with darkness, and the remains of your hair tugged into strange stalagmites.

Don’t say nobody warned you. "This puzzle is SUPER SUPER hard"î enthuses Chongpison in his iTunes blurb, before unleashing a tsunami of exclamation marks that almost had my eye out. And, in case you missed the nuances of that first warning, he goes on to add: "This puzzle is so hard that you shouldn’t even try because you won’t be able to solve it." While we can all hope that Chongpison never puts his mentoring abilities on the line as a police negotiator, he may have a point. Super Hard Puzzle lives up to its name rather admirably.

In some ways, it couldn’t be simpler: use the five small grey circles to cover a larger red one, without leaving any pixels showing. You can place the circles in any way you’d like, and a handy meter at the top of the screen tells you how many pixels remain visible. It shouldn’t be hard, but it is, of course – it’s Super Hard, remember? -  and pretty soon that handy pixel meter isn’t quite so handy anymore: in fact, pretty soon it’s a villainous instrument of cruelty, bathing you in the bitter reflected glare of your own incompetence.

Super Hard Puzzle is not without a couple of wilful quirks, the first being that you can’t move a disk even slightly once you’ve placed it for the first time, a design decision that turns each game into a series of abstract headshots, essentially, as you aim to maximise every single placement in turn. It seems rather irritating at first, but it also raises the stakes quite brilliantly: if you’re going to solve Super Hard Puzzle, you’re going to have to ace it too, five perfect moves building towards total coverage with no space for second guessing.

The second quirk is that, taxing as this puzzle is, the solution is within easy reach from the word go, lurking, perhaps thirty-seconds of 3G connection away, on the game’s only menu. While this initially seems like a concession to the weaker members of the audience, I’m starting to think it’s the game’s masterstroke, the constant presence of temptation taking a fairly austere brainteaser and turning it into a titanic test of will as well as logic. While the game appears to take place entirely within that ominous red circle in the centre of your iPhone, then, it also plays out in your conscience, as you balance your need to get the whole thing over with so you can go and do the dishes, with your more noble desire not to be beaten by something that seems to be so straightforward. Will you solve Chongpison’s challenge, or give in and just look up the answer, aware that you’ll never be able to look yourself in the mirror again and deliver a motivational soliloquy culminating in, ìand that’s why you’re one stand-up guyî?

Me? I solved it, I’m glad to say, although it was more accident than design: four flukey placements at three in the morning and the last disk aided by an unexpected sneeze which jolted my finger across the playing field, bringing it to a halt at exactly the right moment.

I was left staring at the screen for a few minutes after that, as it happens, pondering, open-mouthed, what I was expected to do with the rest of my life now that my greatest achievement was almost certainly behind me. A stroke of luck? Certainly. But it was much more besides. It was, as iTunes might say, something of a religious experience.