Pudding Monsters

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Best Mobile Games 5-in-1 bundle, along with Dig Deep, Om Nom Run, Run Sausage Run! and Sausage Wars.)

Pudding Monsters is a family-friendly Puzzle game originally released on mobile devices in 2012 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. I should note that this game can only be played in handheld mode using the touchscreen. It has you sliding multicolored slime monsters into one another, trying to get them all to connect, ideally in a specific pattern.

The presentation here is bright and colorful, and has some decent animation, but is nothing particularly special. The soundtrack is whimsical but forgettable. At the very least the sounds here are cute, with the slimes making silly babbling noises when you select and move them.

The gameplay here is a pretty simple block sliding-style Puzzle, nothing extremely original for the genre, but this game still manages to keep things interesting with a good variety of different types of slimes and generally solid puzzle designs. Fans of the genre won’t find themselves blown away by this game, but they will find it a fun distraction.

Only… I have to address the elephant in the room… this is a decade-old free-to-play mobile game that has simply been dropped onto the Nintendo Switch without any noteworthy enhancements. And while the $5 price tag on this version seems fine given the lack of ads and over 300 puzzles included in the game, what’s less forgivable is how little attempt has been made to adapt this game to the platform – not only is this game touchscreen-only with zero gamepad support, but players are expected to play it in a vertical alignment… you know, like you would do with the Smartphone version.

As such, it’s hard not to ask yourself whether you might be better off simply playing the Smartphone version of the game. To be clear, the Nintendo Switch version of Pudding Monsters plays well enough, looks decent, and is reasonably-priced for the amount of content… but this game was clearly designed with Smartphones in mind, and this port doesn’t do anything to hide that fact.

tl;dr – Pudding Monsters is a family-friendly block-sliding Puzzle (or slime-sliding, as it were) that can only be played in handheld mode using the touchscreen. The $5 price is decent for the amount of content here, and the puzzles are well-designed, albeit not very original. However, it definitely feels like very little effort has been made to transition this game from its original smartphone version, making one ask whether it might not be better to simply play that version of the game instead.

Grade: C+

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