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 actually write about.
Next, it’s prolific freelance games writer Nicole Carpenter on the endlessly moreish Suika Game:
I may have started playing Suika Game on the Nintendo Switch, but I’ve been devoted to the mobile version since 2024. This fruit merging game from Japanese developer Aladdin X was originally released in Japan in 2021, but went global in 2023, and became a viral phenomenon.
You drop fruits into a box. When the fruits overflow from the box, you’ve lost. To keep earning points, you’ve got to merge fruits by combining two of the same. Two cherries make a strawberry. Two strawberries merge into grapes, and so on, all the way up to a big ol’ watermelon.
If you’re not careful, the box will quickly fill to the top, so Suika Game requires some strategic thinking and planning to create the right scenarios to be able to merge the bigger fruits. Nothing larger than an orange can be placed outright. Everything bigger, which is half the fruit in Suika Game, can only be made through a merge.
All of this is to say that Suika Game is one of those games that is simple yet has deceptive depth. I started playing in 2023, when it started to gain popularity globally. Aladdin X was spun out of the Japanese tech company popIn, which sells projectors; Suika Game was launched in 2021 as an app for one of its projectors, inspired by a Chinese browser game that’s essentially the same, but a bit less polished.
Its origin story is part of its curiosity, but I keep coming back because it’s the perfect mixture of simple but complex. I’ve likely played more than a hundred hours of Suika Game over the past few years, but I’ve never merged two watermelons, a way to clear a ton of space off the board. It’s my white whale. I’d be convinced it’s not possible if I hadn’t watched streamers do it.
Because of the nature of my job – writing about video games – I don’t often linger too long on any one game. I’ll see games through and there are a few that I’ll come back to with updates, but Suika Game doesn’t really even have updates. There’s no complicated monetisation scheme, either. It’s $2.99, and you’ve got the game. Monetisation comes from cosmetics, and Aladdin X has various overlays you can purchase to change the playing field. You can give Suika Game a Halloween theme, underwater look, or Christmas design among plenty others. But there’s plenty to customise for free, too. My favourite is a cute little sticker, like you’d find in a grocery store, on the watermelon.
I haven’t spent any extra money on it, and I don’t foresee doing so. Suika Game, at this point, has an iconic look, and I don’t feel the need to change that—except for one reason. The Nintendo Switch version of Suika Game got an expansion pack that added a couple of multiplayer modes that makes Suika Game into a competition; those modes are time limit, attack, or item, and each of them adds a different twist to the gameplay. I’d happily spend the $3 or so to bring these multiplayer version of Suika Game to mobile, if it were ever to be released.
But for now, I’ve got more than enough reasons to keep turning back to Suika Game. I’m committed to getting two watermelons to touch, at least once.
