Suika Game
Year: 2021
Rating: E
Time Played: ~15+ hours
It’s interesting how a simple puzzle game adaptation can create an entirely original experience. Matching games aren’t new by any means, and ones where matching fuses the two into something bigger can be done as simply as numbered tiles (a la 2048). The challenge of innovating this simple game concept comes with another mechanic: gravity. Suika Game takes this matching puzzle and not only gives it a cute coat of paint by making all the pieces into fruit, but it adds a physics engine that’s both ingenious and frustrating to deal with.
In Suika Game, your goal is to fuse fruits of different sizes until they become a watermelon. Once you manage to create two watermelons and fuse those together, they disappear and allow gameplay to continue. This is no easy feat. Getting to a watermelon is itself a challenge, but getting two of them in a limited space on the game board/box is something that unfortunately suffers from the randomness of the falling pieces. Just like 2048, you can still play perfectly and be dealt a bad hand of fruit that just does not want to stack up and fuse properly.
For what it’s worth, its cutesy aesthetic has made this game a hit with my kids. The cheerful music (albeit in a loop that’s shorter than I’d like) and simple gameplay mechanic make it a great game to kill some time when the kids need to calm down. More serious gamers can try to tackle the game’s physics engine, which sometimes causes fused fruit to pop nearby fruit up and out of the box, thus ending the round too early. Still, its simplicity can be deceptive, as the challenge of fusing two watermelons can make this an almost endless game to play.
A cute matching game with some challenge due to randomness and physics, I give Suika Game 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
