Suika Game - Trying It Out
9Over the week leading up to Christmas 2023, the free trial available was Suika Game. So I decided to give it a try, because this is a low commitment game, unlike some of the trials that came not long before this one. Some people say it’s very addictive, though perhaps I’ve grown older and more weary, as I found it compelling and hit the right spot of it being simple yet deep, but after the trial was finished, I had my fill and I deleted it off the system.
Suika Game began as a tech demo by Aladdin X, a Japanese manufacturer of projectors. This was programmed in-house as a means to demonstrate its resolution and minimal latency in their projectors, but, as is the story of many other accidental successes in video games like Tetris or Mega Man 2, the workers at Aladdin X liked it enough that the company decided to sell the game standalone on the Switch, no projectors necessary. (Currently, the Nintendo Switch is the only system it’s on.) It chugged along modestly as is most eShop entries without marketing of its own, until it got picked up, years later, by Hololive, who made gameplay videos of their own and brought it to the attention of the YouTube public, upon which it became a viral hit and is now arguably Aladdin X’s most well known product by a landslide, enough for it to be chosen as the featured trial game for December 2023.
Me, I’m not a part of the larger YouTube culture, nor do I have any desire to do so. Other people can do as they wish, but I prefer to stay in my own little corner. Vtubers like Hololive are quite popular within YouTube culture, and while I can see the appeal in both making and watching their videos and how they gained a lot of fans, this sort of thing is not my cup of tea. I don’t like hearing people talk over game footage, and I’ve never taken any liking to idol culture or anything resembling it (though I do like parodies of idol culture like Zombie Land Saga and Pop Team Epic). A major part of why I put up videos on my own YouTube channel is because there are fewer people making game footage videos the way I like it, so I take it upon myself to make them.
“Suika” is Japanese for “watermelon.”
Suika Game is set in a big tub, taller than it is wide. It begins empty, and you play as a cloud at the top who drops fruit. You move left and right, and you drop either cherries, strawberries, grapes, oranges, or persimmons. If two of the same fruit come in contact with each other, they’ll merge and become one of the next fruit up the list. This list is as follows (I’m using powers of two because that’s how many cherries each fruit is worth):
1 - Cherry
2 - Strawberry
4 - Grape
8 - Orange
16 - Persimmon
32 - Apple
64 - Grapefruit
128 - Peach
256 - Pineapple
512 - Honeydew
1028 - Watermelon
If two watermelons collide, they disappear. The higher up the chain you go, the more points you get, though I haven’t yet calculated the exact formulae for your score. Most of the fruits are round, meaning they’ll roll around and might not settle where you expect. The game ends once one or more fruits is completely over the brim of the tub. This includes if a fruit gets propelled upwards and out of the tub due to a merging or the movement of another fruit, even if your tub is pretty empty otherwise.
I've seen this game compared to 2048, which is its spiritual predecessor, of sorts, under the premise of sliding two tiles with the same numerical value together to merge them into one tile displaying their sum.
Maybe it’s the puzzle game experience in me saying this, but I would’ve preferred if there was a preview of more than one fruit. Maybe three. It’s hard to plan things out when there’s a preview of just one.
Nevertheless, I was able to work out these strategies:
1. Fruits don't move if they reach the bottom of the tub without coming in contact with any other fruits. Use that to your advantage at the beginning of the game to place fruits next to each other where they're likely to merge.
2. You want fruits next to each other if they're also next to each other in the Circle of Evolution. That way, you can minimize the necessary steps to work your way up the chain.
3. The cloud can only drop the bottom five fruits in the Circle of Evolution. You will never see it conjure an apple or anything larger than that.
4. Due to their odd shape, grapes roll the least. Because the cloud drops it with the pointy end to the right, however, they are more likely to settle rightward.
5. The smaller the footing, the more wildly the larger fruits will roll, and the less predictable they get. That's because they make for smoother surfaces and shallower valleys.
6. You don't have to wait for the fruits to finish settling before dropping another one. Sometimes, it's better to wait and see if they will merge some time after dropping your last fruit. And sometimes, it's better not to wait and drop a fruit to weigh down a group somewhere.