I’ve written in the past about howRiven: The Sequel to Mystis an important part of my relationship with my dad. When Cyan Worlds released a remake of the classic adventure game just months before I was set to go on a family vacation with my parents, that trip started to feel like the perfect time to return to that strange, yet familiar world. On a previous holiday, my dad and I played through some ofPortal 2together, and I thought a return to Riven could fill a similar niche between beach time and big dinners.
Fruit Merge Games Like Watermelon Drop Are Surprisingly Fun
Little did I know that my dad would get my whole family hooked on an entirely different game – well, actually, a whole genre of games. I’m talking about fruit merge games, which apparently are a pretty popular niche on mobile. These puzzlers are the spiritual opposite of Fruit Ninja: that game had you split fruit in two, these games have you bring two fruits together.
My dad has become an avid player of Watermelon Drop, a game where you combine falling fruits like Tetris blocks. My wife and I couldn’t get the game on our older iPhones, so we picked up the jankily named clone Watermelon Merge Fruits Puzzle instead.
Despite its jankier name, Watermelon Merge Fruits Puzzle is actually the better game. Watermelon Drop has intrusive and frequent ads that you need to click several X-es to get through, while I could play my version for 30 minutes without seeing a single commercial aside from a small and easily ignored banner at the bottom of the screen.
These games are a pretty straightforward evolution from match-3 games likePuyo PuyoorCandy Crushwhere assembling groups of like jellies or candies results in the groups disappearing to make more room on the board. Instead of aligning three or four small pieces, though, your goal here is to ram fruits into each other which transforms them into bigger fruits. In my version, it goes grapes —> blueberries —> limes —> bananas —> oranges —> apples —> peaches —> coconuts —> melons —> pineapples —> watermelons. None of us ever got two watermelons to collide, so I don’t know what happens beyond that, but the legend at the bottom of my screen only shows up through watermelon, so it seems that the titular fruit is also the final boss fruit.
Match-Three Is Out, Match Melons Is In
These games are a little more loosey-goosey than most match games. In Puyo Puyo and Candy Crush, one piece takes up one spot on the grid. In these fruit merging games, you eyeball it a whole lot more and fruits roll around and shift once you drop them. An apple has exact measurements but it’s difficult to know what they are just by looking at it. This can cause problems when you get to the top of the screen and have to determine whether dropping another fruit will take you over the line, initiating a ticking timer that will end your game unless you lower the fruit level.
I don’t know why this game ended up being so sticky for all of us. My mom doesn’t play games beyond Words with Friends and has never touched Tetris, but she was as fixated on getting the watermelons to collide as the rest of us. On multiple nights, the four of us sat around for extended periods of time attempting to make our way through the whole cornucopia. I can’t explain it. But I do know that while my vacation is over, my desire to merge fruits lives on.
