It’s odd how viral hits sometimes crop up. Among Us (Free) sat on the App Store for a couple of years without much attention until it caught fire, and now you can buy toys of the little weird characters from it in Walmart. Well, Japan is in the midst of another such viral sensation in the form of Suika Game, a merging puzzler that has rocketed to the top of the Nintendo Switch eShop rankings in the country. That means it has its boot on the face of games like Detective Pikachu Returns and the latest Dragon Quest spin-off, something few could have anticipated when it released to little fanfare in December of 2021.
Suika Game, as mentioned, is a merging puzzle game. You have a container that you will drop fruits into, one by one. If two of the same fruits touch each other, they’ll merge into a different, bigger fruit. The end of the line is the watermelon, which is massive and takes up a ton of space in the container. If any of the fruits spill outside of the container, the game is over. The fruits follow some interesting physics and will often shuffle around a bit while you’re thinking about your next move, and sometimes you’ll think you’ve landed a nice combo only for it to launch an apple into the air and end your run. You’ll get points based on how many merges and combos you muster, and it’s hard not to have one more go at it after you finish a round.
I’m not sure what exactly caused Suika Game to suddenly jump up after a couple of years of laying quietly at the bottom rungs of the Japanese eShop, but it’s safe to say that Vtubers have played a major role in it. Pretty much all of the major Japanese Vtubers have taken a swing at Suika Game now, including my very favorite Inugami Korone. It makes for a surprisingly interesting spectator sport thanks to the many twists and turns its unique physics can generate.
Getting ahold of it on your Switch is a bit of a pain outside of Japan, unfortunately. You need a Japanese Nintendo Account and some way to pay for the 240 yen charge for the game, and you can’t use a foreign credit card in the Japanese eShop. Unless you can get your hands on a Japanese eShop card, you’re out of luck. Or… are you?
Well, the full-on fancy Switch version might be out of your reach, but there’s a browser version of the game that pretty much replicates the experience minus a few niceties. It’s free to play, though there are some ads running. A small price to pay for some Suika Game joy, though. It runs perfectly well in mobile browsers, too. So if you want to get in on this craze while it’s still near the ground floor globally, head on over to the Suika Game site and get playing. Good luck getting your first watermelon!
