The Fruits of Our Labour: How Suika Game is Taking Over

By Features Editor Chloe Barrett

I was never a Tetris girly. When I heard an older person talking about Candy Crush, my interest drastically waned. My attention span has never been particularly strong, and when playing games, my main objective is to follow a somewhat linear storyline until completion. So why am I obsessed with a fruit stacking game?

The Japanese game known as Suika, now being deemed in English as the Watermelon Game, was released back in 2021, but only recently has it gained enormous amounts of traction, thanks to Twitch streaming and TikTok lives. This led to an English version being released last month in America for the Nintendo Switch, and quite a few online versions you can easily play on a web browser. The game itself consists of dropping a random assortment of fruit, that have adorably cute faces on them, into a container. To gain points, you must match certain fruits together, which proceed to combine into another piece of fruit. For example, two cherries make a strawberry, two strawberries then make a persimmon, and so on. The biggest fruit in its final form you can obtain is a watermelon, hence the English translation.

While the game itself was popular enough in Japan, it has completely taken over the rest of the world, thanks to the streaming community. The popular streamer turned YouTuber named Ludwig is what introduced me to this addictive fixation. He is regularly doing live streams of himself playing this game for seven hours a day. I am like an iPad kid when I refresh my subscriptions tab and see that he is live playing it. When I think of him, I instantly want to match fruit. Perhaps it is the catchy music or the adorable aesthetic, but I constantly want to play.

Set by the aforementioned streamers, a goal to reach a certain number of points per round was globally set amongst them. After people began to exceed that score, the true challenge began: double watermelon.

If you achieve the matching of two watermelons together, they combust and you essentially get to begin a free round, but with your score still intact. As of writing this piece, very few people have achieved this goal. I have practically given up, but its compelling nature keeps bringing me back. After every round, I mutter the recurring mantra of “one more game” to myself, certain that the next time will be different, which is probably how Suika is so popular in the first place. You constantly think that you can do better, and when you do not, it is hard to leave on a negative note, so you play again, and again.

I am so sorry to those who I have recently convinced to play this game, but we are in this together. Nothing matters if we cannot reach the double watermelon.