mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

The thing I remember most vividly about this puzzle game from my childhood is the opening cutscene, which explains that Dr. Lanny B. Brilliant created a bunch of new elements but they spilled out of the beaker, and now you have to find and stabilize them so he can collect his Nobel Prize. This includes a charmingly crackly digitized voice line of Dr. Brilliant reacting with dismay to the elements escaping ("What the... what the f... ohhhh....!") which for some reason is a core memory for me.



As the color-coded atoms fall from above, you have to catch them in a test tube and choose where in the beaker below to drop them to form "molecules"—vertical, horizontal, or diagonal chains of the same color—which then disappear. If you drop too many or run out of space in the beaker, you lose.



In an addition to the play-until-you-lose Endurance Mode, there's also a Wave Mode, which cycles through different types of challenges (e.g. make molecules with certain colors, get rid of existing atoms in the beaker) and introduces special items like unstable explosive atoms and unmatchable gray atoms that can help or hinder you. If you survive 75 waves, you win, and Dr. Brilliant gets his Nobel Prize.



I really liked this game as a kid, and I think it holds up well as a fun, polished, Tetris-like puzzler. My main complaint is that the Very Cool 90s Fractal Backgrounds can make some of the elements hard to see. Also, the music is repetitive, but at least you can turn it off.

I was actually searching for the full registered version of this game for years and kept coming up empty-handed, but it has finally turned up on abandonware sites! (Tip to game developers: Please call your games something distinctive and easily searchable. Thirty years from now, aging 2020s kids will thank you.)