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This week’s playlist has arrived

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. HELIX (iOS) BY MICHAEL BROUGH This shoot-’em-up is less of a bullet hell and more of a thumb ballet. Arc your preferred digit in graceful concentric circles around jellyfish and moonrocks to make them explode in dazzling showers of sparks. There’s no tappa-tappa-tappa, just a slick slide across your iDevice’s LCD. Please don’t blame us when full mind-meld mode sets in and you miss your bus stop. Perfect for: Geometry warriors, thumb-twiddlers, your daily commute. Playtime: Best played in bursts of 20 minutes. LATE NIGHT DRIVER…

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Helix, the weirdly sedate new game from Michael Brough, is out now

In his first proper release since last year’s titanic cyber-roguelike 868-Hack (which made our top ten games of 2013), Michael Brough aims for something weirdly sedate. The aesthetic remains defiantly his—glitchy, esoteric, and weirdly lithe—but the movements now are not excruciatingly economic or abstract but simple: you’re drawing circles. Circles and circles and circles. In a post on his blog, Brough details the thought process behind the game: initially an experiment in making touch controls work, it laid dormant for several years, needing a handful of polishing touches that he couldn’t convince himself to sit down and do. He apparently…