Suika Game

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Suika Game, elsewhere referred to as Watermelon Game, is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game that originally released in Japan in 2021 on Android-based digital projectors, but grew in popularity swiftly enough that developer PopIn (AKA Aladdin X) ported the game to Nintendo Switch the same year… in Japan. And while this game would eventually make it to the Nintendo Switch in Western territories in 2023, in those two years it took to make the trip over, it has seen countless clone games pop up. So now that it has been brought to the West by its original creator, it would be easy to make the mistake in thinking this is yet another clone.

This is partly because Suika Game is extremely simple, both in its gameplay and in its presentation. It features simple, colorful 2D visuals of various fruit with smiley faces on them being dropped into a transparent jar by a cloud with a smiley face, backed by a repetitive, synthesized “whistling” theme. It’s all very kid-friendly, but absolutely not at all impressive.

The gameplay at least is pretty catchy. Players must drop the fruit into the jar, with the goal being to try to get fruits of the same type to touch, whereupon they will combine to transform into a bigger fruit. Players must repeat the process, trying to combine as many fruit as they can, until the jar gets too full and the game is over.

It’s easy to see why this game caught on – the gameplay is simple and accessible, but there’s an Arcade-like compelling element here to trying to get your pile of fruit to move juuust right to get the two fruit you want to touch to do so, and start a chain reaction that ripples through other fruit in the jar. The problem is, it’s hard to predict how your fruit drop will bounce, how it will make the pile shift, and trying to delicately create one of those chain reactions can easily cause everything to shift the wrong way and create an irreparable mess.

There’s another problem here too. Suika Game is completely lacking any sort of game modes or options. There’s no timed mode, no puzzle mode, no anything except the main game. With this game only costing $3, this flaw can be somewhat forgiven, but this does nevertheless rob this game of any potential depth it might have.

In the end, Suika Game is a fun time-waster, but it’s not a game you’re likely to play for long after that. The unpredictable nature of the way the game’s physics will work, along with the severe lack of features, mean that even if you’ll get your $3 worth out of this game, you’re not likely to get much more than that.

tl;dr – Suika Game is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game where players drop fruit into a jar hoping to get fruits of the same kind to touch each other, combining into bigger fruit. There’s some compelling gameplay here, but the physics are frustratingly hard to predict. And while the $3 price tag is nice, the game is so severely lacking in content and features that it doesn’t exactly feel like a deal. In the end, this may make for a decent time-waster, but not much more than that.

Grade: C+

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