Playing with your food: Pudding Monsters (pictures)

Pudding Monsters is the newest game from ZeptoLab -- the same company that brought you Cut the Rope. The goal is to slide pieces of pudding so they can stick together, form a ginormous piece of monster pudding, and escape from the humans that want to eat them.

Along the way, you'll get obstacles that'll help your puddings keep from sliding off, or hinder them from joining together. Here, blocks of ice are one-time-use obstacles that break once you hit them.

Different kinds of pudding have different characteristics. The green slime pudding leaves a trail of sticky sludge to prevent others from sliding off.

Others aren't so helpful. Sleeping puddings don't move unless joined with active puddings. Basically, they're just lazy, lazy pieces of pudding.

Puddings with hypnotized eyes move in unison with others, so you have to be extra careful moving them. Slide one, and you'll slide them all.

To pass a level with the least amount of energy and thought, you just have to get all the pudding pieces on the table to stick together. But the real challenge is to get the whole pudding monster in a certain area of the playing field to cover stars that have been laid out on the field. Do this and you'll pass the level with three stars.

Other objects include a cloning machine, which will multiply the little monsters every time a piece of pudding passes through.

If you're stumped, you can buy mushroom boosts with real money, and it'll multiply your pudding pieces.

The end formation after you cheat, er, win using a mushroom boost. Improved result, indeed.