Arachnophilia means "love of spiders", and after playing this game, you will love them for sure. Create your web. Trap the victims. Feed quickly on them, before they rip your web and escape. And then over again. When you play Arachnophilia, you play the role of an arachnid, a weaver, a devourer and a survivalist. With quick reflexes and a good web strategy, you can become a Godlike invertebrate (by eating a bat). But even if you don't get to that level (I warn you: it's pretty hard), you will have a nice sense of being an spider during the minutes a game lasts.
With very simple rules (move, weave and feed), the game challenges the player by sending increasing waves of a nice variety of flying insects that you must trap with your spider web (from flies to stag beetles, passing through fireflies, ladybugs, butterflies, and even bats!). If you have an insect in your web for too long, he would be able to break it and escape, forcing you to repair it. But if you refuse to trap and eat victims, your life bar will deplete very quickly.
Besides the normal game, an "Art Mode" lets you draw your own web without having to stop the waves of bugs, maybe to try a web strategy or just to have fun. As the game's pace grows rapidly with each level, and the bugs tend to accumulate in the web, choosing the right order of actions is crucial. For helping with that, you can press the Space Bar to cancel all actions in your queue, and select what to do next (eating that firefly, or repairing that vital section of your web).
The game's fun lies in fact that gameplay reinforces the theme: it really feels like being an eight-legged, tiny-but-fearsome predator. The options you face at every moment are interesting (to feed or not to feed? that's the question), but you have to choose quickly and correctly or perish from starvation.
Hint text tells you about each new bug you can trap as they are introduced level by level, and some game tips provide real world facts about them as well, so there's even some educational value (did you know some spiders use their silk as armor for their eggs?).
A great game mixing strategy and skill-and-action play -- quick, challenging and funny. It may even make you hesitate the next time you're about to squash a spider.
