FYDO'S MAGIC TILES

I was so ready for this game to be hot butt after Franky Joe and Dirk's Tile Madness, so I was incredibly surprised that this game was released in 2022, by homebrewers! This is a game by Tom Sutton, who is an animator known for work on some Sony Pictures Animation projects, plus as a lead on Paw Patrol (acab to the paw patrol but good on you man.) He has another Game Boy Puzzler, patchy matchy, that we'll check out some day.

Apologies for the watermark in the bottom right corner of my images, I'm taking my screencaps directly from the itch.io page for this game, where you can download the rom for free! The game itself is a falling tile game where you can move a tile in any direction to try and match four. You pick up tiles, shuffle them around with some gravity keeping you from going too high and making stacks fall down, and match four to pop them. On occasion an orb shows up that you need to make a pop adjacent to to clear, you cannot make chains with an orb in the middle though I tried hoping for a cool combo. Combos with falling tiles award extra points, as do matching more than four tiles (the L-shaped parallax lines is an easy way to get points.)

This game is fun, though I was struggling to get into that sort of groove. It's a bit more methodical than tetris, planning instead of improvising with the pieces you're given. Combos are a little hard to get if your board is super tall, at least ones based on horizontal lines are. Vertical lines would I imagine be easier but riskier to build since you're at greater risk of topping out, plus you need enough pieces to slide the needed tiles to the top of the stack. At one point I got a one leading into a power two and the popping sound went up in pitch by a half-step and I felt like god. The graphics are cute, and the music is super good too. There's no leaderboard, but there are achievements which is a first for me on the Game Boy. This is a great game, check it out!