Suika Game

Suika Game is a neat idea conceptually for a casual time waster game, certainly more interesting than the pure number-merging games that came before it. You can take as much time with it as you want, so it’s not like you have to devote constant focus to be good at it. But my problem with this is that it’s far more frustrating than it needs to be. This isn’t like Getting Over It where the frustration is intentionally baked into the game design. Suika Game just feels janky and unfairly punishing for a game that is centered around physics. I like how the fruits tend to slide downwards, so there’s SOME sense of gravity, but the illusion is broken once the fruits combine in an energetic way, causing a stray fruit to launch out of the bowl, instantly failing the player. This always tends to happen right as the player gets some kind of breakthrough. The fruits finally start to cascade, but it is more often than not quickly followed by a buzzkill failure before you get to witness the result of your efforts. Not only that, but there is NO leniency at the top of the screen. The millisecond one of your fruits crosses the top line, that’s it.

Oh yeah and here’s some other annoyances. You can’t mute the music separately from the sfx. You can’t drop a fruit at the very edge of the left or right sides (i.e. you can’t stack fruits on the sides easily). It’s really easy to accidentally teleport the cursor to the other side before dropping a fruit. The cursor moves too slow. The colors are a bit too similar to each other for similarly sized fruit... Anything else I missed??? It’s a lot of annoyance for a simple game. Also this is on Switch only instead of the phone where it god dang BELONGS.

Listen, even if you hate vtubers (and if you’re reading this review I KNOW you secretly like some vtubers, don’t try to hide it from me), there’s a free browser version called Holo no Suika that is designed far better by comparison. The physics make more sense, the design is more lenient. I’ve gotten 3k in Suika Game and multiple 10k scores in the Hololive version, just TRUST me bro. It’s a world of difference. There’s probably another bootleg mobile version of this game that plays better than the original. Go find one and play that instead of this.