Flynn’s Arcade, publisher of the quality retro throwback Donut Dodo, just released Papertris, a new puzzle game on Switch and it only costs five smackers.

Misleadingly, Papertris doesn’t have anything in common in Tetris other than being a puzzle game.  Instead, this one or two-player game plays much more like Columns since a column of colored pieces fall from the top and are placed at the bottom. If clumps of similarly colored boxes are aligned together, they disappear and cause the pieces above to fall to potentially create combos. It follows simple, standard puzzle game rules and isn’t anything you have not played before.

Occasionally, power pieces will fall, like time bombs that explode proximity blocks or down-arrow boxes that reduce that column, to spice up gameplay a bit but it never reaches exciting or fast paced play. In fact, the first several minutes of an Endless Mode run is boring as it is easy to make simple stacks disappear. Even the quick drop option by holding Up on the D-Pad is unexciting because the stack still falls slowly and gives the player enough time to adjust the color structure. The other single player mode is the Challenge option, in which the player is given a specific task like destroying X amount of blocks in X amount of time, but they unlock one at a time and are also slowly paced. There is a competitive two-player mode, but you are still just playing a slower paced form of Columns.

The notebook hand drawn doodle presentation is rather creative, but it is just a shame that the gameplay remains a slow-paced slog. There is an online Leaderboard that uploads your highest score to see how to compete with the rest of the world but even this welcomed feature doesn’t put enough meat on the bone to keep gameplay engaging. However, since it only costs $5, curious puzzle game fans might not hesitate if they have some eShop credit to burn.

Basically The Same As: original Columns

Not As Good As: almost any Tetris game

Wait For It: Rampage Puzzle Attack 2

By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com

Twitter: @ZackGaz

Please consider supporting me on Patreon.