I have played a lot of computer games, and I have to say that The Wizard's Pen is fundamentally different from all the rest. I'll let you judge for yourself whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely not just one of the herd.

Your mentor, The Wizard (he's never named) has gone missing. His animated quill pen (think pen made out of a feather) has come to you for help finding the wizard and deciphering a mysterious book. Through words and pictures, you have to figure out what happened.

Each 'chapter' of the game is built around a central theme. The thing is - you're not going to know the theme until you finish the chapter, just to be tricky. One of my personal challenges was trying to guess the theme before the final 'reveal' of each section. I was close sometimes, not so much on others.

Okay, so enough playing coy. What is The Wizard's Pen? You have a page in a book. You can click anywhere on the page with the quill pen to reveal bits of a picture. You have basically eight chances to guess what the picture will ultimately be. This can vary depending on some other factors, but mainly you have the eight tries.

The pictures will vary quite a bit. There's everything from what you'd consider fairytale objects to items right out of the modern world. The pen even expresses some curiosity over these strange, unusual objects.

In story mode, you'll have 16 pages of pictures to decipher, along with a final picture. Most of the 16 pictures are just click and discover (and it is really cool to be able to click the picture just once and correctly guess the hidden image). Some of the images are distorted in other ways, like being pixilated or twisted or generally scrambled. Some screens will reveal one square of the picture at a time. Click the next spot and the previous image disappears.

The final scene for each chapter is a quasi-medieval picture. Instead of finding hidden things – you're going to point out where things are missing and the pen will draw them in. Your clue might be 'link' and in a part of the picture, a chain might be missing a link. You click it and the link is completed. You'll be revisiting the same four pictures over and over – a garden/backyard kind of scene, a medieval dining hall, a desk, and a creepy laboratory. The missing bits get trickier as you go along so it behooves you to learn what the completed picture looks like on earlier levels.

In between each chapter, you'll get an additional note scribed by the Pen. The notes get ever more fawning as you progress, and gradually reveal the story behind the story (which will make more sense when you get there – except for the moon part which didn't make much sense at all).

It's kind of like the old show, Name That Tune. You want to guess the picture from as few clues as possible. The fewer the clues, the more stars you earn as points. Collect enough stars and you unlock additional sketchbooks that you can play. The only real difference I've seen with the sketchbooks is that they appear to have more pages and you'll know the theme of the book ahead of time.

To help you with your image-guessing fun, you'll get to pick potions between each chapter. You start without any potions and move up to three that you can pick per level. In addition, you only have one potion to choose from initially. By the end you'll have ten different potions to choose from: perception, freeze, anagram, drippy ink, hint, crystal ball, clean slate, swirly, silhouette and lightning. My favorites were perception, clean slate and lightning. Perception reveals a larger square with your one click, clean slate lets you start over with none of the picture revealed but all eight of your guesses back, and lightning flashes the actual picture on the screen for a split second. You may as well use all of your potions before the end of the chapter because none of them carry over to the next. In addition, you can't use potions on special pictures like the swirled or pixilated ones, or at the replacing lost objects one at the end.

You'll have a total of 16 books of 16 pages each (plus that last picture) for the story part of the game. You can potentially unlock seven additional sketchbooks. While there are a fair amount of images to reveal, if you play back through again, you will have exactly the same images in the same order. If you have a halfway decent memory, it shouldn't be much challenge at all if you go a second time through. The only kind of amusing thing is that the Pen's notes to you change if you come back after solving the story the first time.

In order to guess each picture, you'll be typing your guess into the little box provided. I feel that the game has really high quality word recognition. I know some games where you can get hung up if you don't call something exactly and only the same thing that the developer called it. In this game, an item might be a sofa or couch or chair and any of those descriptions will do. I really appreciate the work that must have gone in to protecting the gamer from what could have potentially been a very frustrating experience.

The item sketches are all nicely done. The music is kind of bouncy/wizardy music. It wasn't bad but it did start to get on my nerves if I heard it too long at one stretch. Note – this might be more of an indictment of the current state of my nerves rather than the quality of the music itself, just to be fair. Happily there are controls for music and sound effects built into the game.

The Wizard's Pen is definitely different. I haven't played anything else quite like this. My initial impressions would say that The Wizard's Pen isn't all that addictive, and yet I have no other explanation for why it kept dragging me from chapter to chapter until I finished the entire story. This probably isn't something I would play through a second time, since the images are all the same, but it wasn't that onerous a journey through on the first pass. I did enjoy guessing things with just one click of the picture revealed. My gut instinct was right more times than not which made me happy. While there's nothing in the game that I would object for my daughter to see, I think it would be a little too hard for her to play without help. I think the images require more experience with the world than she has at this point.

One final thought I'll leave you with - one of the chapters is called "Things in you pocket". How many people do you know that keep golf balls and tooth brushes in their pockets?