Having played literally thousands of indie games at this point, I’ve been blessed with a certain amount of perspective, and depending on the game I’m reviewing that can be an asset or an obstacle. On the one hand, I’m to the point that even with genres or styles of play I don’t particularly like, I have a basis for evaluating them fairly against their peers on their own relative merits. Given that I believe every subgenre should likely be able to have a game that could at least reach the high 8’s or a 9, even in a category like casual games, I think there’s a great deal of fairness and benefit in evaluating games that way. That same familiarity and depth of knowledge can also lead me to scoring down games more mainstream reviewers may love though, perhaps failing to know there are stronger examples out there simply due to a lack of exposure.

That brings us to Berry Bury Berry, a game that really does have some simplistic charm to it, and that I have no doubt people can enjoy. While, to some degree, your focus throughout will be to simply keep sending fruit down a hole, the underlying magic is a mix of hidden surprises, and a consistent upgrade loop that continues to introduce new elements of fun to the mix. You can sort of think of it as a very streamlined job simulator, giving you the satisfaction of a generalized repetitive task, but then layering on the excitement of the unknown. It absolutely isn’t something everyone will like or understand, but the appeal is definitely there.

Where I ran into some troubles with it, is that this sort of game has been around in some form for a little while now, and honestly among its peers I don’t see as clear a hook here. Some titles will use a pinch of horror or some element that will introduce a little tension, others I think did a better job of trying to get their hooks into you a little earlier and more aggressively, and I suppose since most games have a different central task you’ll be doing perhaps mechanically this isn’t quite as satisfying somehow. In the end there are a few different games out there in the eShop in roughly this same general lane, and I think which any particular person will gravitate to will vary. That said, in my mind this just didn’t do as good a job of getting me invested in sticking with it as some others did.