Game: Suika Game
Genre: Puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch (also available for Android and iOS)
Developer|Publisher: Aladdin X
Age Rating: US E | EU 3+
Price: UK £2.69 | US $2.99 | EU € 2,99
Release Date: October 10th, 2023
Review code provided with many thanks to Nintendo EU.
Suika is the viral watermelon game that has been flooding Japanese Twitch for the last year. This 2048-style fruit-combining game is part luck, part physics, and part an adorable fruit-with-faces game.
Suika Game and Synthetic Watermelon
Suika was created by Aladdin X, a company in Japan that makes projectors. After seeing how popular the Chinese game Synthetic Watermelon was, they decided to make a cute version of it to show off the company’s projector products.
The game was so popular among customers that Aladdin X put it up on the Nintendo eShop for sale. From there, Suika Game took off on Twitch in Japan, eventually becoming so popular that it was released across all eShop markets in October 2023. Since then, there have been many copycats of Synthetic Watermelon and Suika.
The way Suika Game works is that you drop matching fruits on top of one another. When a fruit matches one it touches, it combines to make the next fruit in the Circle of Evolution.
Once you make two large watermelons, they combine, and then they evaporate, giving you more room in the bag for combining even more fruits and raising your score. You can keep track of your scores from that day, that month, or overall.
Suika Game is Super Popular for a Reason
In my last review of a Watermelon Game called Watermelon Challenge, I think I mentioned how addictive this game is. There is something really engaging about watching your biggest fruit get bigger and bigger. I can’t get enough of these types of games. I’ve played many different versions, and I was super happy when the Switch version, which I had seen so much of on Twitch, became available in the US and EU.
There is something very appealing about the fruits’ cute little faces, the physics, the movement, the style, and the feel of dropping the fruit down onto their friends. Some of the versions of the Watermelon Games have fruit that is so bouncy it’s almost impossible to tell where they are going to end up. Suika has a great balance of bounce and weight to make it feel good to drop them down.
However, there is an issue with Suika Game that I haven’t had with other versions of the game: you can’t move the cursor to the edge of the screen. This is as far left as I can’t move this Strawberry, but there is plenty of bag on the left still where fruit can get stuck.
This may seem like a nitpick, but it is something that I feel a lot of other versions do better. Other than that, the movements, animations, and everything else about Suika Game is far more polished than many of the other versions of the Watermelon Game I have tried. It’s hard to believe a projector company made this for demos.
Conclusion
Suika Game is a cheap, fun, addictive little game with some of the most adorable faces ever before seen on fruit. It’s soothing to play, fun for the whole family, and a wonderful addition to any Nintendo Switch library. If you are looking for a goofy, last-minute gift or something to do with a Switch gift card, Suika Game is the best US $3 you can spend.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
