We’re trying something a bit different this week. We asked five game critics for a piece on a mobile game they play regularly, but never get to never get to actually write about.
Next, it’s VGC deputy editor and overall games media legend Chris Scullion on Disney Solitaire:
Since everyone likes a heartwarming story, I’ve decided to share the story of how I recently escaped from the clutches of a partner who, for the past nine months, hasn’t loved me and frankly didn’t deserve me. Don’t worry, I’m referring to Disney Solitaire.
As the head of a household whose religion is Disney, and a sucker for a Solitaire clone or two, the arrival of Disney Solitaire was met with a mixture of excitement at the prospect of two of my interests merging, and the sheer terror of the inevitable grip it would have on my free time and wallet.
Sure enough, the game made an impact right away by rubbing a cheeky little £1.99 introductory offer into my gums. You know the trick: the common free-to-play technique of making sure the first microtransaction is ‘micro’ enough to give the impression it’s playing fair. But I was soon to find out it wasn’t.
For the uninitiated, Disney Solitaire shares a lot in common with Candy Crush Solitaire, which I downloaded at around the same time but eventually fell off when it started getting repetitive (Disney Solitaire is obviously repetitive too, but kept my interest for one reason I’ll get into).
Rather than the standard ‘Klondike’ form of Solitaire which was made popular around the world when it became a free Windows game, Disney Solitaire’s stages are instead based on Golf Solitaire, where you draw a single card and then have to pull cards from the stage that are either one higher or lower.
If you can pull all the cards before your deck runs out, you win the stage and move onto the next one. If you don’t manage it, you can either pay coins for power-ups to keep going, or pay coins to try again. Naturally, coins can either be earned through gameplay, or by forking over cash. And it’s here where the problem lies, as it so often does.
I’m convinced, frankly, that Disney Solitaire’s decks aren’t as random as they appear. For the first half of most stages, I always seem to get the card I’m looking for within just a couple of pulls from the deck, then as the stage nears the end I can find myself pulling 10 cards in a row and not getting the one I need. Luck of the draw? Maybe, but when you’ve played more than 5,300 stages (seriously) you start to notice trends.
It doesn’t help that the game pulls every free-to-play trick in the book in ways that are often more transparent. The number of coins needed to play rises ever so slightly every few levels, meaning bundles of coins and rewards gain less value. When I first started playing the game, it cost 1,000 coins to start a level. Now, thousands of levels in, it costs me 45,500. Needless to say, coin bundles don’t go quite so far these days.
Every month or so it’ll introduce a new cooking gimmick, where completing some levels gives you ingredients which can be used to cook certain recipes for coin rewards. If you can clear all the recipes by the end of the period, you’ll get a massive coin reward. Naturally, the last recipe involves comically rare ingredients that you can basically only get by paying money.
See also the puzzle pieces you collect, the Cars-themed races against other players, the Rapunzel-themed ‘Lantern Lane’ (where you earn special coins but can’t unlock anything with them until you clear a paid roadblock, which for me is currently £22.99), the Tea Time Quest (where you collect tea leaves for rewards, and the last one takes forever), the Inferno Chase (where you have to clear many levels in a row for big rewards), the collectible playing card sets which pull the same “a few rare ones” gimmick as the cooking quest… long story short, the game overwhelms you with countless ways to earn rewards, but always makes the big ones just out of reach for those not willing to pay.
So I’ve paid. And paid more. The actual total amount is too embarrassing to share here, frankly, but let’s just say if it was a kid using it on their parent’s phone it would be enough to end up in a newspaper with a staged photo of the parent angrily pointing at their phone bill. But the good news is, I’ve finally broken the curse. I appreciate that’s what everyone says when they’re stuck in a rut and are trying to convince themselves that things are better than they are, but I’ve genuinely reached the point I was trying to reach to get out of this game’s grip.
As you clear a set number of levels, you complete scenes from Disney movies. The game occasionally adds new scenes, and as the sort of player who always sets my own arbitrary targets in live service games, I told myself that if I could clear all the scenes, I would stop spending money on it.
Well, dear reader, last week I completed the final scene, and unlocked the ‘bonus’ area, a sort of holding pattern for players to endlessly play stages until new scenes are added. The game promises at least 13 more scenes are “coming soon”, so I know that at some point the next scene (based on the underrated Luca) will appear, and I’ll be thrust back into the grind where the game, now certain I’m a whale, will continually throw £12.99, £16.99, £24.99 coin offers at me.
Well, it can swivel. I’ve caught up with its scenes now, to the extent that I’ll have plenty of time to happily grind slowly through each one with the free coins available to redeem every hour. I’ll continue playing the game, but it’ll no longer be able to play me.
There’s a quote attributed to Walt Disney, which goes: “All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me. You may not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”
I can absolutely relate, because in the nine months I’ve played it, Disney Solitaire has booted every one of my pearly whites down the back of my throat, and now that I’m out of its grasp I’ve never been happier.
Disney Solitaire is one of the most engaging, colourful, compelling games I’ve played for a while. I don’t recommend it. Play Pocket Card Jockey on Apple Arcade instead.
