Given the tremendous volume of budget puzzle games in the Switch eShop, I’ll admit that it’s inevitable to see quite a lot of titles that are simply variations of one another. It’s true, there are still periodic releases that break away from the pack to deliver something new, but in general those are a rarity. If you’re releasing something that just adheres closely to a style that’s already known, you can still obviously try to gussy the experience up a bit with a new look, but without some twist or surprise it can be hard to be convincing. 

In the case of Tiny Biomes, what you simply have are a few visual variations on the classic game of Pipes. For those unfamiliar, it’s a pretty straightforward concept with you needing to ultimately move some substance from its starting point to all available end points. To do that, you’ll need to change the direction of various types of pipes that are arranged in a grid, rotating them in this case until you form the proper sequence to get everything fully connected. In this case the biomes are pretty well just cosmetic, changing up the visual trappings between forest, volcano, and winter themes, but doing little else.

I suppose if you’re just looking for something to kick around with to kill time periodically, this isn’t such a bad deal, but in general it’s a pretty simplistic implementation. Without needing to position the pipes, merely rotating them into the right direction, it really lowers the skill bar quite a bit. I had hoped that the biomes would get progressively harder, or have something more to offer than re-skinning the base puzzle engine, but unfortunately that wasn’t to be. As you progress through the levels they do at least get a little tougher, adding more end points and junctions, but in the end this is a pretty bare bones implementation, lacking in a satisfying challenge even for moderate puzzle fans.