Either the folks at at Digital Eel have an endless supply of great ideas or someone over there did too many hits of acid in college. Either way, the end result is a never ending stream of great games that are most times creative and almost always fun.

The latter is more important than the artistic side of things, but Digital Eel understands that the hook of any decent game isn't the veneer but the simplicity and familiarity of a game concept. That's why you'll see them use popular game types to push some kind of artistic vision like rail shooting, match games and block stacking games. The final result is usually something that hasn't been done before or just hasn't been done as well.

Their latest game, Soup du Jour, is a prime example of this, combing simple match-four gameplay with some fun physics that put the match game genre on its proverbial ass. Soup du Jour is a simple game where you must match up shapes inside a boiling pot that sits on fulcrum like a precariously balanced see-saw (the pot doesn't ever tip but it gives the illusion that it is unstable and ready to "drop it" like it's hot). Put too much in the pot and it spills over, causing your Swedish Chef look-a-like to go a little bit insane. But here's the real hook: the game uses rubbery, bouncy physics everywhere. And when I say everywhere I mean everywhere - in every screen of the game you'll see word boxes and other interface elements jiggle, drop, congeal and ooze into place all through the power of gravity. Sometimes it's just fun to click through the menu and watch crap fall and slide into place..

The game, on the other hand uses a lot more gravity and physics to liven up the old boring match-four game concept. The idea is to use the cursor, which is shaped like a hand, to move objects around in the pot. As you move similar shapes towards one another, they connect ever so slightly and create a trail of shapes. when you can get four together they disappear and the more shapes you can get together and eliminate, the higher the score will be at level's end. I say match-four a lot, but the truth is that you are really challenged to chain together as many shapes as you can - five, six, whatever you can do.

But while you are trying to connect the shapes and make them disappear, even more shapes are falling, filling up the pot and causing it to teeter and overflow. Worse still, if you are not fast enough, the pot starts to fill up and shapes start to go over the side. You get five spills before the chef goes completely bonkers and the game is over, which means you better plan on bringing that popcorn or bone back into the soup or you'll be sorry..

When you get all those crazy shapes in the pot and you try to move a chain of them around things get very wild. Shapes pop up, sideways, downwards etc, and the farther away you are to your target the harder it gets to pull that chain of shapes through the crowded mess of squares, circles, lines and more. As you pull through a packed pot your finger cursor begins to stretch, as if to say "hey dude, this is not a good idea." And in this game, it isn't cool, because all those shapes will try to pop upward in the pot and fly out. But if you can get the hang of it, the game is a lot of fun and can be very challenging. As you progress through the game the drop rate for objects will get faster and some awful distractions will make their way into the mix like bombs and rockets.

Bombs are particularly nasty because they send everything around them in all directions. It's like trying to grab rice being thrown at a wedding when a bomb goes off inside that pot. The best way to deal with these bombs is to grab them and throw them over the side as quickly as possible. The same with rockets - grab them and dump them as soon as you can. Rockets just dive right into your pot and go around and around , sometimes helping (the mix up causes some similar shapes get together sometimes, which is a good thing) and sometimes sends everything all over the place.