Instead of jumping into another RPG after Demon Gaze II, I’ve been playing Pyramid Solitaire Saga for the past couple of days. It’s another prettyfied puzzle game from King, makers of Candy Crush Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and many similar time-wasters.
And these games all share one thing in common: they all start out really interesting at first, lots of fun progress and freebies. Then they introduce all kinds of annoying gimmicks and stack them up, one on top of the other, so the game gets harder and less fun as it goes along, all to encourage you to spend more money and time on them.
Well, they’ve got my time at least. But not my money, never my money. Pyramid Solitaire Saga is based on… Pyramid Solitaire. Which I had never heard of until just now when I googled it. I know regular Solitaire, and Freecell (man I wasted so much time on that) and Spider Solitaire but not Pyramid. Still it’s the same concept, more or less. A>2>3>4>>>>K>A etc etc. There are one or more gold cards at the bottom of the stacks in every puzzle and your job is to whisk all the blocking cards away until you get to it.
Of course they don’t make it that easy for you. Alas. In every stage you have to navigate one or more of the following challenges:
Blue card: You have to get at least one blue card before you get all the gold cards, or you fail the stage.
Streak: You have to get a number of cards in an row, usually some reasonable number but sometimes something crazy like 40 cards in a row. I can see this getting very annoying the further along I go.
Bandaged cards: Cards covered in bandages so you have to tap them twice to unlock, wasting your moves every time.
Chained cards: You have to get a streak of four in a row to unchain these cards and then tap them to remove them. If you fail to complete this process, all the chains grow back at once and you have to start all over again. My least favorite gimmick.
Cards with leaves: Similar to the chains, but the leaves grow back in stages so there’s still a bit of room for error.
One-up cards: Their value goes up by one every turn, e.g. a Q turns into a K, etc. Supposed to make for strategic gameply but can be safely ignored so far.
The early stages before they added all these complications were the most fun. One of my sisters likes these puzzle games, but she only likes the easy parts. So she’s perfectly fine just starting from level 1 in every session, playing till she runs out of lives, then going back to level 1 again the next time. It just boggles my mind. I’m not super into challenges or anything, but I can’t imagine playing that way and never making any progress. But when I consider all the dealbreaking gimmicks King likes to add like the bombs in Candy Crush and the frogs and spiders in Farm Heroes, I kinda see where she’s coming from. Sometimes you just want some simple and mindless fun, y’know?
At least Pyramid Solitaire Saga is more generous than Diamond Diaries Saga, which I am about to delete. It gives a regular super-powered mode with lots of Jokers, and you can earn 30 mins of free lives and a host of other useful items just by progressing the stages. So if anything gets too annoying you can just hack your way out with the items and gamble on the next stages being more reasonable.
Music? Sorry, I play on mute so I wouldn’t know. Same with sound effects. I suppose I could turn them on for a minute and see… Yeah, blah. Forgettable. There’s no attempt at a story, yay. Puzzle games don’t need stories. I like the relatively muted colors. Nowhere near as bright and garish as the other puzzle games. It feels less kiddy and more relaxed that way. Apart from that I’ve got nothing to say about the superficial stuff.
What I like
-Bright happy colors, but not too bright. I really like the way it looks on my tablet.
-Simple, addictive gameplay.
-Generous game with lots of freebies.
-It requires some thinking ahead but isn’t too complicated.
What sucks
-They suckered me in with simple gameplay and now they’re complicating things.
-Annoying gimmicks that will only get worse as it goes along.
-Creepy crawlies in the form of scarabs scrambling all over the screen. I’m not scared of insects but they’re annoying.
TL;DR: Pyramid Solitaire Saga is a fun puzzle game but I can see the stormclouds on the horizon. I’ll delete it if it ever gets too bothersome to play.
Next up: I was at a standstill until this morning, when I finally decided to play Ys Seven. Why? Because. As for the Ys Celceta I mentioned I’d started some months ago, it’s dropped. Something about the open fields just rubbed me the wrong way, not being able to save stressed me out and I couldn’t make sense of the battle system.
Wait, come to think of it, instead of Ys I should play Final Fantasy XIII instead. I said I would, and I don’t want that game to follow me into the new year. Okay FFXIII it is. No wait, Ys Felghana is supposed to be short. Maybe that one…
….Or maybe I won’t play any of those and will start something else. Eh. Let’s play some more Pyramid Solitaire Saga while I try to figure it out.
You have the sorriest game. You ripped me off so many bricks saying i can continue my game and it just started me over a new game. I believe you purposely do little gimicks just to force us to put money into your pockets.
For the record, this isn’t my game. I’m a fellow player and sufferer. Or ex-sufferer rather, because I stopped playing Pyramid Solitaire Saga a while ago. That said, the incident you describe sounds like a bug, so please contact King through their Help website for assistance: https://www.help.king.com/hc/en-us#%20
Oh,it is all about the money!