Solitaire Klondike Minimal

Genre: Card Game (Solitaire – Klondike)

Players: 1

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Review:

Solitaire Klondike Minimal, released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a version of the Card Game of the same name. As this game is a classic card game and likely older than anyone currently reading this review, I’ll be focusing mainly on the presentation, features, options, and performance of this game.

The presentation here is, as one would expect, minimal, and that’s both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, the simple visuals of this game look decent, but the slightly-stylized look can make it difficult at times to judge a card’s suit, and sadly there are no alternate appearances for cards – what you see is what you get. The same goes for the game’s chill, percussion and acoustic guitar music – all you get is the one theme, and that’s it.

For options here, you have a mix of good and bad. On the one hand, this game does have draw-one and draw-three variants, and interestingly there’s a separate option to change the game’s difficulty, something that I don’t see too often in Klondike Solitaire games – usually games judge draw-one and draw-three as difficulty settings in and of themselves, and leave it at that. On the other hand, there’s no options for scoring rules, and in fact no scoring at all – only a timer that ticks off as you play and a move counter, along with stats that track your win/loss record. Also, for those who have never played Klondike Solitaire before, there’s no tutorial, and not even a “How to Play” guide. There is a “hint” button, but overall, if you don’t know how to play Klondike Solitaire, this game is not interested in helping you to learn how to play.

The gamepad controls here are pretty good, although the button shortcuts are a bit odd and take a little getting used to. The game also includes some pretty decent touchscreen controls as well, for those playing in handheld mode.

The only other thing to address here is the price, which is mostly pretty good, but with a caveat. This game launched at a $3 price tag, dropping down to $0.69 at regular intervals to spur on sales. That’s pretty normal for low-effort indie games on the Nintendo Switch, though. However, in a sleazy move, the moment Nintendo changed the eShop so that games priced under $2 aren’t given a featured spot on the eShop, this game was raised in price to $4, just so it could continue dropping a buck down in price to go on sale every month, now for $2. While I would say that $2 is a decent price for this game, it’s harder to swallow knowing that the standard price of the game was raised just to make it seem like a better deal.

Overall, if you’re looking for Klondike Solitaire and only Klondike Solitaire, Solitaire Klondike Minimal is decent, even if it’s missing some options. While I do not approve of the way this game tries to game the eShop’s pricing, it is nevertheless a decent but not great way to play this classic game of Solitaire.

tl;dr – Solitaire Klondike Minimal is a version of the classic card game that is, as the name states, pretty minimal, both in its look and in its options. Still, as versions of the classic game go, this is decent enough, and the price is good too, as long as you can look past the fact that its standard price is more expensive than it used to be, just so the publisher could make its sale price look better by comparison.

Grade: C

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