Quell is a surprisingly somber collection of 'ice puzzles', the type where your avatar rockets forward in their chosen direction until they hit something. Building from that core, the game throws a number of twists at you - blocks to push, portals, playfield edges that wrap around toward one another, to name a few - while keeping the difficulty curve tight and engaging throughout 100 or so levels.

Despite its simplicity, Quell left a good impression on me because of the replay value. There is the usual sort of optimization challenge, trimming your movement until you reach a theoretically perfect solution, but there are also a smattering of collectible gems that you can find inside of various cells, usually well off the beaten path of the intended route. I found these quite fun to find, as you use the carefully arranged level items to get your slippery bubble to more and more obscure portions of the stage. Using the same mechanics in a sort of freeform, exploratory way kept my brain chemicals flowing.

Thematically, Quell appears to assert that its puzzles represent distant memories of an elderly couple, which the developer appears to be quite proud of, according to the store page synopsis. The whole thing is skin-deep, though decidedly unintrusive. If you can tolerate some melancholy, Quell is a zippy and stimulating puzzler.