Game: Watermelon Challenge
Genre: Puzzle
System: Steam (Windows, macOS, Linux)
Developer|Publisher: Floofy Feather Studios
Controller Support: Full
Price: UK £2.59 | US $2.99 | EU € 2,99
Release Date: November 20th, 2023
Review code provided with many thanks to Floofy Feather Studios.
Watermelon Challenge is a Steam copycat of the massively viral Suika: the Watermelon Game, which has been massively popular on Japanese Twitch. So, let’s dive into how different Watermelon Challenge is from the original game.
Copycats All the Way Down
The first that I could find in this genre of fruit-combination games was a web-based Chinese title called Synthetic Big Watermelon. Created in early 2021, Synthetic Big Watermelon went viral in China, and it influenced a Japanese company called Aladdin X, a manufacturer of projectors, to create Suika: the Watermelon Game as an application designed to run solely on its projectors.
Fans of the little game kept contacting the company after seeing Suika, and eventually got the company to port the game to Nintendo Switch in December of 2021. It started getting a following through V-Tubers on Twitch in Japan before spreading to enough parts of the world that Aladdin X made a global release across Switch regions, including the UK, US, and EU.
After Suika appeared on American streams, companies began porting it to other places like PC. The most popular of the Suika-like titles is the free, in-browser version called SuikaGame.com. There are also many mobile copycats and even more games like it on platforms like Steam and itch.io.
This genre of fruit combination games is just a subsection of a variety of combination games that have been around forever and I believe, will continue to be popular for as long as video games exist.
Gameplay of Watermelon Challenge
Similar to Suika and other games of its type, Watermelon Challenge has a total of five fruits that can drop. The smallest is a cherry, then strawberry, grapes, oranges, then lemons. They can be combined to make avocados, then apples, peaches, bananas, eggplants, melons, and watermelons, but none will ever drop. In this genre, usually combining watermelons explodes those massive fruits, making room for smaller items.
Watermelon Challenge is played with either the directional keys or WASD so that you can play one-handed with either hand. You move the fruit at the top with the left and right arrow keys to line it up, then use the down key to drop the fruit in the desired location. A plate in the upper right shows what’s coming next, and a hold fruit. This is a unique feature in Watermelon Challenge; none of the other Suika games I’ve played have had a hold feature. Surprisingly, this doesn’t make the game any easier.
Like Suika, the game is over if a fruit pops up across the top of the bag, even if it was launched into the air by some weird physics trick. I thought this was a bug in Watermelon Challenge, but it appears to be something all these types of games do.
The Pros and Cons of Watermelon Challenge
Suika and Watermelon Challenge and the like are incredibly fun and addictive games, in my opinion. So, instead of focusing on what makes the genre fun, I’m going to point out some of the items that are unique to this game that I like a lot. I think that the ability to have a fruit on hold and swap it out for something else is a great addition. There is a version of Suika that I play on my phone that offers Rainbow fruit that can be combined with anything, as well as bombs to help get you out of trouble, but the original Suika and similar titles don’t have any way to dig yourself out of any messes you might make. The soundtrack is a little repetitive, but it’s a fun little song. The visuals are unique as well; all the faces on the fruit are hilarious.
As for the cons of the game, I don’t really like the odd shapes of Watermelon Challenge as much as the smooth, all-circular shapes of Suika. The bananas especially tend to get caught on things, and the bottom parts of the avocados are such a weird shape. It can make figuring out how fruits are going to roll nearly impossible.
Thankfully, Watermelon Challenge seems to be mostly bug-free; there is one that regularly shows up where if you combine too many fruits together all at once, some of the fruit will just disappear into nowhere and never return. I suppose it’s not the worst bug you can have in this kind of game, though.
Conclusion
Overall, Watermelon Challenge is a fun, Suika-type game for Steam. For only $3, it’s a wonderful addition to any library and makes for a fun gift for long-distance friends as well.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
