It’s been a few months since Higher Plain Games has touched a Suika-like game, so Night Light is our regular return back to this casual puzzle trend. Suika-likes are games that use the concept of merging two of something to create a bigger new object, whilst filling up a limited playing area. Night Light takes this concept away from its traditional bin container or bowl arena, and places it in a pool table. This opens up a few interesting twists to the formula to help it stand out.
First and foremost, instead of balls, you’ll be merging a strange gatcha egg toy thing. Each toy is a round egg containing an animal inside, and the animals get bigger as you merge them together. The graphics have a weird cubic balloon quality to them and are heavily stylised. I must be honest, at times I liked it, and at other times, notably when the screen is very busy, I was less keen. The goal is to merge your animals all the way up to an elephant, and then see how many elephants you can fit on the pool table. A meter shows the percentage of playing area available; although it doesn’t tap out at 100% full. Game over is triggered slightly under a 100% full table because you need to have space to place your gatcha egg on the table in order to take a shot.
Egg placement is half the strategy to Night Light. If there’s space on the pool table for it, you can place it there. Then, with the mouse cursor, players can aim at any angle and then use the distance from the cursor and the egg to judge the power of your cue hit. It’s simple and effective, because it prevents players from getting stuck with any timing-based issues, and as there is no timer or clock in Night Light, it makes sense to let the game run at the players’ own pace. The shot is the second half of the strategy. You can merge eggs, or you can ricochet off of table walls or into other eggs, just like an aggressive game of pool. The collision physics are consistent and repeatable, meaning trick shots to trigger one egg to hit another, to cause a merge elsewhere, are a realistic and repeatable strategy. In fact, I’d argue it’s the best bit of the game. As the pool table fills up, you’ll notice that eggs start to jiggle a little as they fight for space, and the physics of merges can create a bigger egg that sends other eggs flying around the table like a chaos machine. Again, this is a large part of the fun, and very welcome.
Where Night Light doesn’t quite follow through is in replayability and longevity. There is only one mode, with a single high score logged locally. This game is ripe for a 3-minute challenge, or a 50-egg or 100-egg challenge, to reuse the same gameplay loop to add more challenges. If each challenge came with a proper local leaderboard, that’d be an improvement. An online Steam leaderboard would have been fantastic. Night Light is a cheap game, but missing these features feels like a misstep.
If you are looking for a pool variant of Suika, then Night Light is a cheap and fun option. Just know before you buy it that its limited single mode will mean there isn’t a ton of reasons to return unless you are happy chasing your own, singular top score.
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