Game Reviews

Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures

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Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures

In these obesity-obsessed days, you'd think more developers would consider making food games.

In bringing its coloured fruit-based mobile puzzle Super Yum Yum series over to DSiWare, developer AirPlay is playing the saintly fruitarianism role: hard for humans but technically impossible for insect-hungry chameleons such as our hero Leon.

Good thing it's a computer game.

Chew on this

The reason this particular type of lizard has been chosen is because of its extendible tongue and ability to change colour.

These two features are neatly combined: scattered around each level are various coloured fruits. However, our protagonist can only indulge his appetite if a fruit is the same colour as himself.

He eats by extending his tongue, which is also useful for pulling himself across gaps, assuming a fruit of the correct hue is within range.

The trick of the game is the change of colour Leon's greed triggers. On eating a fruit, he'll turn the colour of its leaves and in this way, a mazey colour-based puzzle game, in which your progress blocked by increasing numbers of fruit, is created.

Your task is to eat as many fruits as possible and then exit the level. Eating every single one results in perfect completion, but you can get away with a few as you want.

This will limit your access in the main menu though - you have to eat a certain number of fruit to open up new areas and complete all 48 levels.

The later levels also introduce baby chameleons who must be gathered up along the way, allowing you to eat extra large fruits.

Snack or feast?

It's a great puzzle concept, and on the surface it works as well on DSiWare as it has on mobile.

Initial levels are sparse of fruit, allowing you to get to grips with the idea and learn the techniques. With move and one action, controls are simple.

However, once you understand the basics - which takes around five minutes - you'll discover there isn't much to it and that, when put into practice, it becomes a rather boring mechanic.

Partly this is because on DSi you want a variable feast of gaming, measured in fractions of hours than the bite-sized repeatable minutes of mobile gaming.

Conversely it's also the case that as levels fill up with more fruit, each new one feels more daunting than the last, not more exciting.

So rather than plan ahead and work out the best or correct move, it's easier to start eating and hope it falls into place.

With the ability to only undo one move at a time, and the larger levels spanning several screens, this means your many mistakes are overly frustrating. Equally, getting that perfect rating on each level doesn't feel necessary. The thought of going back and trying to eat every fruit is a tedious and, indeed, fruitless task.

Spit and polish

None of this is helped along by the lack of finesse.

Graphically Super Yum Yum Adventures is adequate, but the sound effects are unbearable, with the main character declaring each and every fruit 'yummy' or 'yum yum'. There's not even any in-game music.

Still, there is some attempt to mix things up. At the end of each world, there's a boss battle, which involves stopping a moving bar in the correct place over and over again. Sadly, it's not very exciting.

It's a shame, because we've enjoyed the series on mobile, but this is one example where the different demands of technology and audience mean that more work is required to extract the potential even out of a strong gameplay concept.

Maybe Leon would have been better sticking to a diet of flies.

Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures

Super Yum Yum Puzzle Adventures demonstrates it's harder than it looks to bring good mobile puzzle games to portable consoles
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Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.