So, the indie-sphere was abuzz yesterday with talk of Daniel Johnston's new video game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I checked it out and it's pretty rad.

The premise is simple. You are a dude (are you Daniel Johnston? perhaps) and you are trying to smooch your girlfriend when THE DEVIL COMES ALONG. Of course. And he turns you into a frog/block/sphere/etc. drawn in the style of Daniel Johnston. It's a 3D platformer with a fairly standard 2-axis tilt control scheme. You can also tap "stop" zones to freeze, arrows to rotate your view of the world, and anywhere else to make your character hop. Each level is constructed of an interconnected network of planar platforms and your primary objective is to touch all of the green ones then make your way to the level exit. Bonuses are awarded for completing levels before the clock counts down to 0:00 and for activating all of the red "bonus" blocks in a level. Here's how it looks:

As you can tell, the world is full of the sort of wacky psychedelia that you'd expect and the soundtrack is by Daniel himself. In other words, it's awesome.

For the $0.99 I paid for it, man is this ever a good game. I have put about 30 minutes into it, give or take, and I've only finished 6 of the 27 levels and unlocked two of the characters. Of course, I am the sort of person who revels in a sick sort of videogame completism, so I have gold medals (all green and red blocks within the time limit) for each of those six levels. If you're anything like that, you can expect this to be a pretty good buy.