Friday Timewaster: Higher

You may have seen images of a house flying under balloon power somewhere recently, and I have no idea how influenced by that Higher is, but I can tell you this a hypnotically relaxing game. This is a free, Flash based browser game. Starting on the ground, rolling your cursor over passing balloons will slowly raise you into the sky, which is full of mines! You can click and hold the mines to move them out of the way, or preferably into each other, thus clearing your path to the stratosphere and beyond. If you need to move left and right, you can do so using the WASD keys. Space pauses, and you can click on ‘upgrade’ to exchange the points you’ve one for house upgrades that will take you even higher than before.

After a couple of minutes you should get the hang of Higher, and it then becomes a really engrossing game, with you constantly managing your balloons and shifting mines out of the way. The pause is a big relief, and your progress is automatically saved as long as you don’t delete your browser history.