There’s a surefire way to know that a puzzle game has sunk its claws into your brain: it’s there when you close your eyes. It’s happened with Get 10 Quest, which is almost all you need to know.
With that said, on with the needless detail. It’s a simple mechanic: tap an area of two or more matching tiles, and they shrink down to a single tile numbered one higher, and everything above drops down to take its place. It’s an expanded version of an HTML5 game, there are other versions of the same thing on the app stores, and it’s not a million miles from something like Threes.
And yet I thoroughly recommend lobbing less than three quid at this to play it on the Switch. It would be a particular perversion to play it docked, but on the touchscreen it has a minimalist attraction, and the sound effects of tapping tiles, then collapsing in on themselves are just right, making it far more satisfying than it has any right to be.
And that simple mechanic is a winner. There’s little in the way of instruction, but the nuances come out through play: which tile in an area you choose to collapse down to is absolutely key; smaller and bigger areas have their pros and cons; low numbers at the bottom of the screen are a screaming nightmare.
The standard Endless mode keeps going until there are no areas of matching tiles, but the new Levels mode introduces targets and modifications – different sized or shaped grids, time or move limits – that make you think differently. They’re not easy, but they’re good training to keep you progressing in Endless mode.
The only downside is that there are no online high score tables in Endless mode, so it’s hard to know what’s a good score. It’s a strange oversight – much like the description and trailer on the eShop, which do a quite tremendously poor job of selling the game.
But really it’s a very easy sell: it’s smart, it’s cheap, it’s good.
Get 10 Quest is out now on Switch.
