Casual puzzle games have been popular since the days of Tetris, but are especially so right now (Does a day go by when I don’t get a Facebook invite for Candy Crush?). And why not? They’re fast-paced, colorful, simple to learn, and of course, highly addictive. Such is the case with Kapi-Bara-San Kapi Crunch, a puzzle app from Namco Bandai Games Inc. It’s based on a popular Japanese lifestyle brand featuring an adorable, cartoon-style rendition of the hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, a.k.a. the capybara. The game board has multiple rows of different-looking tiles, and play involves switching the tiles two-at-a-time to make rows with the same face. Three in a row makes them vanish and be replenished by more tiles, while four or more are replaced by fruit, flowers, and other icons, which have the potential to cause chain reactions, such as eliminating all the same tiles from the board. The key to accessing these moves is making the capybara “eat” the special icon by placing them side-by-side.
Chain reactions and multiplier effects are nothing new to puzzle games, but in Kapi-Bara-San Kapi Crunch, the board is divided into four quadrants, and the player can rotate them 90 degrees at a time. This takes a while to master, but it makes getting the capybara over to special icons much easier. Between the flashy effects and versatile game play—eating apple tiles transports the player to a mini-game that involves racing the capybara toward bonus objects—Kapi-Bara-San Kapi Crunch is highly stimulating and tough to put down. Ironically, the capybara is considered among the more social of the mammals; humans, however, may be far less likely to look up from their mobile devices once they start playing this puzzler.
