Piyotama (PS3)

“Piyo” is a Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of little birds chirping, while “Tamago” is the Japanese term for an egg. With the name Piyotama then, the English name would essentially be ChirpEgg, a perfectly serviceable title even when the Piyomama is added to the picture. The Chirp Mama being the mother of the Chirps all makes it sound like it could work if this was an English puzzle game, but Piyotama is probably the better choice since it makes this puzzle game sound much more interesting than two bird-related English words smacked together.

 

Piyomama is a mother hen who lays a batch of eggs every spring that hatch into little fruit shaped birds known as Piyos. This year though Piyomama’s gone overboard and flooded the forest with all sorts of Piyo eggs, the player needing to help hatch them quickly enough by matching the Piyo eggs before the play field is flooded with too many of them. Piyotama is a match-four puzzle game in a very traditional sense in that you need to line up objects of the same color horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, the eggs hatching into Piyos and flying away to make more room in the field for more matching material to drop in. Gravity will rearrange the eggs to fill in spaces even if you sometimes need to shake your PS3 controller so the eggs will shuffle down, but Piyotama’s gameplay does have more going on than just the basics of a matching game.

First, after you make that initial match, the eggs won’t hatch immediately. You’ll have a window of time after to continue making matches, the player even able to reuse pieces from one match to make another. This is because Piyotama doesn’t have you control the incoming eggs but rather a horizontal bar you can move up and down across the play area. The egg stack in the shaft contains up to six eggs per row, but the player is able to carry three eggs on the outside of the shaft. These three eggs can be pushed in to shove the row of eggs over, three eggs popping out the other side as the new set settles into its spot and starts triggering any available matches. However, the three eggs you pushed out of the shaft are now the three you are carrying, the player able to move them up and down or cycle the order of the eggs to shove them into another row.

 

The nature of the piece moving method means you’ll swap between having your held eggs on the right or left with each action taken. Considering this basically lets you remove half of a row’s pieces at one time, reshuffle them, and push them back in, you are able to have a good control of the play field and set up matches you can identify even if they require a little legwork to complete. The alternating from right to left does complicate things enough that you can’t build a match from scratch too rapidly, the player incentivized to search the pile for ones that nearly came into existence on their own and making the right swaps to make that match. The control you have over so many pieces at once does mean you can string together some incredibly large chains of matches during that grace period where the eggs are waiting to hatch after the first match.

 

It might take a bit to realize how much control you really have over the eggs in play in Piyotama, but part of that is because the game does a bit of a poor job discouraging random egg shuffling. Considering you can transplant half a row into a new location rather quickly, it’s not too hard to just rapidly grab eggs and mix them around in hopes of hitting a successful match, this even working surprisingly well when you’re trying to get a longer sequence of matches going. The game won’t hatch an egg if you’re holding it once the combo timer is up, but other than that small punishment for not watching what you’re moving around, it can feel like Piyotama gives you a bit too much power to accidentally make matches. Getting deeper into the game naturally does require developing an eye for how to build you matches and accounting for the alternating sides you influence, the game eventually deciding to crank up how many eggs drop in at a time and the speed at which they do so to force novices to consider their actions a bit more. Perhaps only grabbing two eggs at a time would greater incentivize thoughtful play before the game starts reaching unmanageable levels so that the play getting that far would feel more meaningful, but at least the colorful burst of all the Piyos hatching from a screen full of eggs is still a lovely sight whether or not you really earned all those matches.

The mode you play Piyotama in can determine how much the aimless egg shuffling really helps you out too. Piyo Coop is a timed challenge where you’re judged on how many matches you can managed within a set time frame, the timer likely to run out before the game ever pushes you too hard. This is definitely more an efficiency challenge than a survival one, and players willing to consider their moves will find more value in replaying this than those who simply want to earn matches by any means necessary. The Free Range mode is what Piyotama calls its endless play, and whether or not you’ve learned how to set up your eggs quickly and intelligently will determine how far you can go. You will only last until the screen is filled with eggs and no more can be added in this variation, so being able to clear a good amount of them quickly when the difficulty starts ratcheting up is key to continued survival. These modes can still be handled somewhat well with the less thoughtful approach though, but there is is some incentive to not play so mindlessly.

 

Piyotama does have some methods it tries to use to curtail the amateur tactic of tossing eggs around and hoping for the best. Two-player battle mode will allow you to pollute the opposing side’s play field more if you can manage huge combos, the inherent boon of clearing your field coupled with complicating things for your opponent if you try to be more tactical in egg placement. Every mode contains special eggs that sometimes enter the board, and while the score boosting one is pretty easy to ignore due to its more abstract benefit, a Wild egg can enter the shaft that, when matched with a few eggs of a certain color, will clear all of the eggs of that color when it comes hatching time. To help avoid buildup of a particular egg color the player will at least recognize they want to match this Wild egg well even if it doesn’t pan out in the end, slowing down any frantic shuffling as they try to make things work. On the other hand, the other tool Piyotama has for this purpose are Heavy eggs you can’t push around, locking down one entire horizontal row until you can successfully match and hatch that troublesome egg. Multiple Heavy eggs can be in play at once too, so once the game becomes more willing to throw them into the action, it is pivotal players at least work to address this lingering restriction before it leads to too much of the shaft having inaccessible eggs.

 

Piyotama’s two modes and simple to grasp concept does mean it’s pretty easy to turn on and jump in to play either with strategy or dumb luck, and the visuals backing this egg hatching game are quite nice. The cartoony Piyo birds are cute and the backgrounds behind the egg shaft all look like they’re from illustrated children’s books, the premise of a hen laying too many eggs already feeling like it was ripped from one in the first place. As you progress into deeper levels of difficulty by making enough matches, the background will slowly go through the seasons as well ensuring a bit of visual variety, but there are skins available as well to swap in holiday backgrounds. Somehow, Easter isn’t included, but Christmas and Valentine’s Day do vary up the background. There are supposedly Summer beach and Halloween themes but they seem to be released only in some regions and sometimes only for a set period of time. Regardless, having a way to vary the visuals even a little bit at least makes popping in for a quick bit of play less repetitive, although the PSP release of Piyotama would likely be better for those interested in short sessions.

THE VERDICT: The match-and-hatch puzzle action of Piyotama is both cute and satisfying, the colorful appearance coupled with the dramatic burst of the Piyos coming out of their eggs making for a puzzle game that has a simple but effective theming for its familiar color-matching gameplay. However, the game perhaps gives the player a bit too much control over the pieces in play, being able to push three eggs out of play and moving them to different rows opening things up a bit too much to random shuffling and mindless play. While battle mode can reward smarter play it is two player only, so it’s mostly just the special egg types that can curb such an effective play style from dominating how you approach Piyotama in its early stages. Getting long chains of intentional matches is key to good play when you’re going for high scores or surviving the endless mode, but regular Piyotama is a bit too prone to rewarding randomness for this to be a standout puzzler to return to often.

 

And so, I give Piyotama for PlayStation 3…

An OKAY rating. As mentioned earlier, it feels like Piyotama just needs to cut things down a little bit to start making the player consider their moves a bit better. Having the hollow but exciting looking early matches from random shuffling settles players into a play style that won’t benefit them once the challenge sets in, and it’s easy to resent limitations like the Heavy egg since it’s restricting your abilities rather than your limitations being finely tuned to start with. The way it prepares its player for harder levels isn’t really a problem though since people actually interested in playing the game long term would recognize the need to start planning their moves once big combos start being less freely available, but it can still feel like carrying three eggs at a time gives you a lot of power over the play field. More special eggs or perhaps greater rewards for combos outside of specific circumstances could do a lot to push players towards thinking about their moves, but reducing the player’s control to only two eggs at a time could do a lot to remove the ease with which players can bumble their way to decent scores and later levels on luck alone.

 

Piyotama is a cute little color matching puzzle game and perhaps it wanted kids who were pulled in by the colorful chicks to still be able to experience the satisfaction of a huge match. However, more options could have definitely done a lot to let younger players have their easy matches while more skilled puzzle game fans would be able to tinker with things to draw out the challenge that is inherently present in Piyotama. Even making it an option how many eggs you can move at once would let the game have essentially an easy and hard mode, and other adjustments like upping special egg counts or adding AI opponents for battles would continue to increase the game’s value. Sadly, despite Piyomama laying far too many eggs, the Piyotama developers didn’t have too many ideas on how to vary things up besides holiday backgrounds, so this puzzle matching concept ends up decently fun but lacking in consistently engaging play.