Christmas Puzzle Story

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in 18 in 1: Family Games Giga Pack, and 20-in-1 Bundle: Megapack Collection!.)

Christmas Puzzle Story is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024 where players drop various Christmas-themed items onto the play field, trying to make two items of the same kind touch, causing them to combine and transform into a larger items. If this sounds familiar, it is because this premise and gameplay formula is very similar to Suika Game.

Here’s where I enter my usual spiel about it being okay to be a copycat so long as it’s a good copycat, and asking whether Christmas Puzzle Story is a good copycat. So… is it?

I should note that this game is almost exactly the same as a previous game I’ve reviewed, Fantasy Saga Frenzy, just with different visuals and theme. As such, I have copied over the majority of that review here, changing the pertinent details.

To its credit, Christmas Puzzle Story does add one feature that wasn’t present in Suika Game, local multiplayer gameplay. However, other than this it’s not quite as cheerful a comparison for this game.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, even the core Suika Game gameplay here is pretty poor, with pieces often bouncing unpredictably, and with the chain of objects not seeming to have any rhyme or reason, with jewels turning into potions turning into other objects that become other potions and then other jewels – if there wasn’t a helpful guide showing you the progression, you’d have to memorize it all because there’s no logical pattern here.

I suppose here’s where I talk about presentation, and it’s fine, with colorful, cartoony objects and backgrounds that are attractive enough. This is all backed by upbeat music with snippets of Joy to the World, but it’s extremely repetitive and gets irritating before very long.

What all this amounts to is that Christmas Puzzle Story mostly looks decent for a Suika Game clone, but adds little to the core gameplay, and detracts from it with physics that make the game more unpredictable. What’s more, despite that this copycat game adds little to the game it copies, it costs over twice what the original costs – $8 compared to Suika Game’s $3. Unless the multiplayer this game adds is more important than gameplay, I can’t recommend this game when you can just spend less and get the game it’s copying instead.

tl;dr – Christmas Puzzle Story is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game where players drop Christmas-themed items into the play field hoping to get items of the same kind to touch each other, combining into bigger ones. This game is clearly copying Suika Game’s formula, and apart from local multiplayer it adds nothing, while playing worse and costing a lot more. You’re better off just going with the original Suika Game, or one of countless other clones.

Grade: C-

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