I continue to be somewhat surprised at both what appears to be the general success of the Suika Game puzzle type, and the speed at which other developers have moved to try to find their own way to capitalize on it. At its core the concept is a pretty simple one, revolving around your ability to combine 2 of the same fruits touching each other, resulting in a bigger fruit taking their place. Your goal is then to try to keep doing this, gaining points, and avoiding any fruits going past the line in some way, ending your run.

Playing the original version on Switch, I was pleasantly surprised by both its simplicity and how quickly it was able to pull me into a mild addiction for a few hours. I’d played games in the same general vein as it on mobile like Threes, but never in this format. Since then I’ve played quite a number of variants, some setting themselves apart with a specific new mechanic or idea, and others being happy to simply do little more than re-skin the experience, making their quality level vary quite wildly.

To Fruit Mountain’s credit, while it doesn’t deviate far from that same core gameplay experience it does at least change your perspective on it, moving from the 2D container you’d typically dealt with and replacing it with a tray in a 3D environment. Weirdly enough, though it still feels quite familiar, this does work quite well in making the experience feel a bit different. Granted, since you lose the moment anything falls off of your platter you’ll need to be careful how much you may stack your fruit, but the temptation as you start to run lower and lower on available space is always there.

While it hardly revolutionizes this subgenre of puzzlers in any significant way, it does legitimately make enough of a change to the formula that it feels like it deserves a glance if you’re a fan of that style of game. Sure, it isn’t breaking new ground overall, but it would be foolish to dismiss the difference as a mere gimmick as 3D models of various shapes and sizes interacting with each other does tend to be more unpredictable than in a flat 2D space. I still think I’d say the original is the best to start with, but if you enjoy that style of play this is a novel variation on it.