If there is one thing that the DS provides us, it's solid lineup of puzzle games. The portable's stylus allows for that unique type of interaction that brings a new dimension to even tried-and-true puzzle formulas. The same can be said for Eidos' Prism, but while the puzzles are fun for a while, the game's drab presentation keeps it bathed in darkness.

Prism involves shining and refracting light through mirrors and prisms in order to make the light giving creatures, the bulboids reach their intended targets, tiny beings called glowbos. The challenge comes when the glowbos far outnumber the bulboids, not to mention that the light must change colors many times in order to correctly free the glowbos from their prison of darkness. There are several other tools that you'll use, such as t-splitters and filter blocks, and you must strategically place these around the board so that every glowbo receives not just light, but light of the appropriate color.

The game's opening puzzles are quite humble, making you feel smarter for solving them so quickly, but as the levels go by (there are 120 in all), the difficulty ramps up to almost mind-blowing proportions. A hint system is in place that will all but solve the puzzle for you, but this is only available through the first 40 levels. Needless to say, those first 40 levels fly by, meaning that you can whiz through a third of the game's primary missions in under a half hour. Graciously, though, the developers allow you to replay any level.

Prism offers a few other modes of play, all of which are good, but grow boring quickly. Time mode is more or less the standard mode with a time limit. Finishing a level gives you more time on the clock, and it boils down to essentially an endurance run. Hyper mode is more frantic, with glowbos popping up faster and faster. Infinite mode is again much like the standard game, only it moves directly from one level to the next with the goal being to score as many points as possible. The most fun will probably be had in the game's multiplayer game, which allows two players to co-operatively tackle levels, each controlling half the screen. The game supports Download Play, so the other player doesn't need to own a copy.

Unfortunately, the visuals change very little from level to level. The music is extremely basic and repetitive, almost to the point that it seems like it is trying to lull the player to sleep. Yes, this is a puzzle game, but a little more vibrancy and life in a game about light could have gone a long way in encouraging gamers to spend more time wrapping their brains around the mind-bending puzzles.

Prism is not the DS's most innovative puzzle game, and its presentation tends to dull the senses rather than illuminate them, but there is no denying that the challenging puzzles and secondary modes offer some solid replay value.