Vanishtan

Well this was a nice surprise! Each week when Steam updates which games are on sale, I like to poke around through the games with few or no reviews and are cheap that look interesting to me at all. A couple bucks for the chance of finding something decent is worth the risk to me. It's far more misses than hits, to be honest, but the hits make it worth it. Vanishtan is one of the hits and I'm glad I took a chance on it. I've only played one round so far but I had a lot of fun with that round. As you can tell from the store page, this is a falling block arcade puzzler similar to Puyo Puyo or Columns. Match up four of the same time of pieces and you'll clear them, causing the surrounding blocks to fall, getting the chance to get combo scores. What sets this apart is the unique elemental aspect that you usually see in something like Pokemon or similar games, where fire monsters do extra damage to ice monsters (I don't actually know what affinities are strong or weak against what in Pokemon, it's just a hypothetical example, don't get mad at me if that's not accurate to Pokemon). Here, if you clear a set, if there are any pieces of the type that your cleared pieces are strong against, it'll clear those as well, allowing for lots of potential combos and also a lot of broken combo set ups from not taking those additional disappearances in account. Now, I'm no expert on these kinds of arcade puzzlers. I've played plenty throughout my life from childhood rentals and browsing through romsets but I'm a very casual player of these things. I feel like there has to be another game that has this elemental feature but I can't think of any. If it exists, it must be pretty darn obscure. Either way, it's a neat addition to this style and once I started getting the hang of it, I was trying to set up big combos. I kept screwing up but that was my fault, not the game's! The presentation here is pretty low budget, to be fair. No background music, programmer art, and just kind of a spartan look to it overall. I actually dig all of that, it reminds me of the tiny shareware games I would play as a kid but your mileage will vary there. I'm also not entirely sure if the monsters that appear on the outside part of the screen matter or not. Is it just a random thing or do my matches affect that in some way, increasing my score? I do also wish there was an option to start the game at a higher speed, since starting from scratch makes the beginning a little too easy for a while. Of course, once your mistakes stack up too much, you'll quickly crash out but I managed to last for 15 minutes on my first try. A two-player mode could be a fun addition too. At least it worked out of the box on my Steam Deck! This isn't a masterpiece but I liked it way more than I expected to. I'm really glad I took a shot on it. These tiny games deserve a chance and games like this are what keep me doing that. I don't know anything about the dev but good job. I like it. I hope you've got more in you.