Xbox Live Indie Games come in many sizes and packages, but few of them are actually solid on all major aspects of a game: music/audio, gameplay, and graphics. It makes sense; most of these games are developed by a single person who has very limited real game making experience and the Xbox Live Indie Games channel is serving as little more than a testing ground for their abilities. Rob Hutchinson, however, the developer of Breeze, seems to know what he’s doing.

Breeze is a unique puzzle game that tasks you with controlling a fan to blow a flower to the end of the level. It’s a pretty simple concept that actually gets pretty advanced when you put it into practice. You move the fan closer ot farther away from the flower and use varying degrees of wind to float the flower around the level. Should the flower touch anything, especially you, it will get destroyed and you will have to start over from the beginning.

But I suppose what’s most impressive about Breeze isn’t the gameplay mechanics, which are solid enough to be a merit in its own right, but rather the fact that the wind blows and the flower drifts along in a very realistic manner. The game can probably be classified as a physics puzzler as the game uses enough of each to give the game a truly amazing feel.

Additionally, Breeze is also one of the few Xbox Live Indie Games that not only has a unique look to it, but also one that is very pleasing. This game is no slouch when it comes to graphics and it definitely shows that the developer either created some high end art for the game, or hired a really good artist to do it. Either way it looks great.

Oh and let’s not forget the music, while it might not be my regular cup of tea when I’m driving around town, the music in Breeze is undeniably good for the context of the game. It’s very relaxing and offers a great atmosphere.

Breeze comes in at 240 MS points ($3) which is a bit higher than what we’ve grown accustomed to on the Xbox Live Indie Games market, but when a game like Breeze comes along, I have trouble not recommending a heftier price for what amounts to a heftier game.

[This is not a review. This is a "first impressions" piece based on less than an hour of gameplay.]

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