Greetings friends, Romans, countrymen:
In my quest to find things to do in my downtime at work, I discovered some fun online games. Samorost1&2 deals with helping a gnome/elf get through various odd situations. Samorost1 can be played free online, and the first 4 levels of Samorost2 are also free to play online. They can be accessed here:
http://www.amanita-design.net/games.html The same studio also launched Machinarium (I also bought the full version of that one, but the demo is fun too and worth checking out). In Machinarium, you control a robot who, like the gnome, has to find his way through some puzzles. I'm not AS big a fan of the Machinarium design scheme, just because I like the organic/mechanical look of Samorost versus the more exclusively mechanical look of Machinarium (think of "Wall-E" or "9"), but this is merely an aesthetic preference.
The games remind me a little bit of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, The Incredible Machine, etc. in that it's not all, "shoot all the bad guys!" but rather, "figure out how this works".