Mobile phones have become a fertile breeding ground for puzzle games of all stripes, from basic crosswords, to a plethora of Tetris-like assembly games, to less familiar offerings that test your IQ or ask you to clean up neural networks. Sorrent has a unique idea for quenching this pervasive thirst for mental exercise. It aims to roll up word, spatial reasoning, and logic puzzles into a single attractive package; then it will update the game on a daily basis. The aptly designated Daily Puzzle has come a long way since we first tried to wrap our collective brain around it at CTIA this past fall. If you're a puzzle fan, this game's impending release is definitely a cause for excitement.

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Scott Kim, Sorrent's resident puzzle whiz/giant pulsating brain, has been hard at work cooking up enough material to provide Daily Puzzle with three entirely fresh frontal-lobe twisters every single calendar day of the year. It seems as though the game could have a very wide appeal due to the breadth of its material. For instance, we took a crack at a word puzzle that had us changing one five-letter word into another by changing one letter at a time, thereby coming up with transitional words. Then we turned around and tried to mentally fold up a striped box from its flat configuration, failing utterly. Happily, Daily Puzzle takes advantage of its online connectivity to offer you instant community feedback on your choice. As a result, we felt vindicated when we found out that most other players got that question wrong, too.

Daily Puzzle's interface has a definite game show aesthetic that's attractive without being overly flashy or distracting. The interface is rendered in soft pastels and features lots of little blinking squares on the loading screen, '70s computation lab-style. The puzzles themselves are totally straightforward and very legible. They were often bigger than the screen of the Sanyo 8200 we were playing on, but the game smoothly scrolled up and down as necessary to keep the questions accessible. Daily Puzzle's sound effects were also notable. In fact, this version of the game provides a lot of auditory feedback for menu choices, answers, and so forth, which helps to focus your attention on the task at hand.

Sorrent will make Daily Puzzle available via subscription purchase in the very near future, first on Sprint PCS and then on Verizon. We haven't had a chance to sample many of the puzzles yet, but the ones we tried out were a lot of fun and were also fairly challenging. With online leaderboard functionality included, this game will hopefully be one of the most fully featured puzzlers available on mobile. Stay tuned for more details and the full review.