Suika Game (Switch)

Suika Game is a simple enough puzzle game, but its origins and rise in popularity after being discovered by online content creators is quite a story. Originally this game about combining fruit was made not for a video game system, but for ceiling mounted projectors. A little bonus included for people who bought Aladdin X projectors, its popularity with customers lead to it getting ported to the Nintendo Switch, but it sat humbly on the Japanese eShop until streamers discovered it and found it incredibly addictive. In time, Suika Game’s popularity would lead to it receiving a global release and at a rather low price, leading to millions of sales. Its game design may not be anything new, but an addictive design can carry a well-positioned game far, even from such an unlikely source.

 

Suika Game is all about trying to build your way up to a high score by dropping fruit into a transparent container. The fruit is two-dimensional, but you still need to worry about the physics involved in dropping a bunch of round objects in an enclosed space. The fruit in the container will spin, slip, and roll, and while some like the grapes and pineapple appear to have different shapes, they do mostly interact as simple circles as well. Controlling a small cute cloud overhead, the player drops in the fruits one by one, randomly receiving new ones although they’ll at least get to see what the next fruit they’ll receive will be. While you’ll earn points for dropping a fruit, the way you’ll earn higher scores and survive is where Suika Game’s most addictive qualities manifest, as any two fruits of the same type will fuse together when they make contact, becoming a larger but more valuable fruit in the process.

The “suika” in Suika Game’s title is the Japanese word for watermelon, and while high scores are what you’re aiming for, getting a watermelon can feel like a monumental task itself. There are 11 types of fruit in Suika Game, the smallest being a simple cherry, but when two identical fruits make contact, they are upgraded to a new fruit in the Circle of Evolution. Two cherries will always evolve into a single strawberry, two strawberries into a grape, and so on all the way until you reach the massive watermelon that almost fills half of the container on its own. Working your way up to a watermelon can be quite a process, the fruits the player is given to drop only ever reaching as large as the orange, a fruit that serves as the fifth smallest one on offer. You’ll need to repeatedly build up to other large fruits like peaches and pineapples and make sure they can make contact with each other. Mismanaged fruits can make it so your container ends up splitting apart vital matches or small fruits could end up trapped at the bottom, taking up space and making it more likely you’ll end up running out of room.

 

Suika Game ends only when a fruit goes too far above the lip of the container, but how this is determined seems a little inconsistent. At times you can stack some fairly large fruits at the very top without the action ending, but at other times the fruits adjusting in the container can launch a fruit upwards and lead to an immediate loss. The physics in Suika Game don’t really seem to be trying to mimic reality, some fruits spinning in place even when surrounded, but they are usually reliable enough you are sometimes better served sitting back and watching the fruits settle or roll about. There is no timer so you can drop fruits as you like, so you can afford to wait on adjustments, but one thing even real physics couldn’t have accounted for is the fruit fusion. When two objects suddenly combine to form one larger object here, their mass is not entirely preserved. This can mean the game has to figure out how an object that was once touching a fruit would react to a much larger fruit popping into existence, and this is where you can find some of those unfortunate moments where a fruit is launched like a rocket out of the top of the container. A rarity but not an impossibility, it does end up being the kind of thing you should be cautious of but won’t live in constant fear of happening.

Suika Game does have a few local leaderboards to keep track of your best scores, even splitting them apart for things like daily performance compared to your all time bests. Online leaderboards also exist and their presence is rather devious. Taking a peek and seeing the global leaderboards go up to over 10,000 points can make the 2,000 you earned feel rather small, but that is because earning such monumental totals requires making two watermelons and matching them, the watermelons disappearing as you do so and allowing for the fusion process to begin again. Merely making it to a watermelon feels like a milestone though and leads to some of the game’s addictiveness. The core idea is simple enough players can immediately comprehend it, but working up through the different fusions isn’t so easy. You run out of room gradually and the incoming fruits won’t always be a good match for what is already in play, the player needing to remain flexible but also plan ahead to succeed.

 

Suika Game is also undoubtedly adorable, colorful and inviting even though its one music theme can get a bit repetitive. Generally Suika Game is lean on other options, the game briefly taking on holiday theming like a Halloween and Christmas version but most of the time you’ll be left with the one mode of play and one visual design. The visual clarity is certainly sound in the default appearance though, the player easily able to recognize incoming fruit even if they play in handheld mode. There is one way a mistake can potentially be made though, and that comes in the control department. All you do is move left and right as the cloud and press a button to drop your held fruit, but if you reach the edge of the container, pressing in that direction once again causes you to teleport to the other side. While technically a convenience, this also disagrees with some of the game’s more precise demands. Tossing a cherry down into a small gap between fruits can require some positional micromanagement at times, and if it is at the container’s edge, it is possible you’ll teleport accidentally while trying to line things up just so. If the game truly needed one setting to toggle it might be whether this teleportation kicks in, but otherwise the simplicity is clean and effective and already the game design is honed to keep you coming back as you keep trying to build up to those ever elusive watermelons.

THE VERDICT: The fruit fusion play of Suika Game is quickly understood yet constantly compelling because it’s not so easy to build your way to a watermelon. The physics, while a little strange at times, still give you more room to impact what’s already in place than a typical block dropping puzzler. Trying to manage the larger fruits while you’re only handed little ones to add to the pile necessitates adaptive strategy to succeed, and yet a cute look keeps Suika Game inviting and pleasant even when the play field is packed.

 

And so, I give Suika Game for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. It’s telling the little quibbles I have with Suika Game are things like the wraparound movement and the occasional fruit that fires upwards like a rocket, because little else in its simple systems comes up short. There could be a little more room for visual clarity, the pineapple’s leaves and shape of the grapes are a little deceptive, but since they’re truly round like everything else you understand how they should behave and you can quickly get a feel for how the fruits will settle. The game letting you drop fruits as large as an orange can lead to little empowering moments where you can make quick progress and yet you still need to really work to get up to the pineapples, melons, and watermelons because they demand multiple large fruits aren’t divided by the plentiful small ones you’ll inevitably have to place. It’s a game of quick satisfactions but a long term goal that feels within reach while still being difficult to pull off, the work up to a watermelon always feeling important while high scores help you have some other metric for success. In fact, your highest scoring play might not even be one of the rounds where you make a watermelon depending on how things hash out, although the watermelon is definitely still key to greater successes. Something to prevent pieces rocketing out of the container and a few more little settings like the permanent option to switch to the alternate holiday themes would tidy up this puzzle game a bit, but it’s hard to say Suika Game comes up short when you’re constantly diving right back in after a loss because you believe you can do better next time.

 

Suika Game slips in nicely next to Tetris for an addictive puzzler that you can hop back in and play again, but it even has a few things that can make it more addictive. Working up to the watermelon is a more tangible long term goal than hitting a high score and Suika Game’s play is more easily disrupted due to the size of the fruits you’re working with, nothing akin to waiting for a long piece present in this puzzler. They do have different charms, Tetris more involved and Suika Game more relaxed, but both tap into things like on-the-fly strategizing and building pressure to manage a cramped play field. Humble beginnings belie how easily Suika Game can suck the player in, it definitely for the best it escaped its digital projector origins so that people trying to make massive watermelons won’t be hogging what should be business equipment.