PEGBRJE: Picky Pop and Doodle Dates
Cute and Consistently Confusing
Picky Pop is a numerical puzzle game made by Froach Club, the studio that brought us Fish Fly fever earlier in the bundle. That same cute soft style returns for this domino-adjacent title where players will be fulfilling their desire to increase their score while appeasing Picky the cat and Pop the bear who watch from above with varying expressions.
Players will be given two blocks that are two numbers long, with one being horizontal and the other vertical. The goal of the blocks is to place them on the grid above and ‘pop’ them for points. To gain this ‘pop’, place incremental numbers (in either direction) side by side to have them glow and become interactable. So for example, if a block is a vertical 4–8 such as the one in the picture, placing it under the 4–7 will cause the seven and eight to light up. If both sides of a block light up, the entire block itself will become an opposite colour and become ‘pop-able’. Clicking on them will then grant points and remove them from the board, allowing for new pieces to be added and points to be gained. This is the core of the loop, although it does take a bit of getting used to — at first I thought that the block needed to have all sides as incrementals, but in reality it only needs one to light up that side. This means that causing a block to illuminate can cause a chain reaction with many others attached to it lighting up if planned correctly, but that rarely happens as planned. Most of the game will be searching for imperfect solutions to the ever growing problem that none of the pieces available can pop anything on the board, leading to a spiral of attempting ‘hacked’ solutions. A lot of the gameplay feels like Tetris in this way, where players are more mitigating damages to their perfect structure more than setting up said perfection.
As said earlier, Picky Pop continues the trend of Froach titles that are just super comfy and chill to play, little bits of style here and there to keep things fun and exciting. Both Picky and Pop will react to any move done in a variety of ways, but will always look adorable while doing so. It isn’t super revolutionary, but it’s a title worth puzzling through during any down time you may have, seeing how high the score can go before the board gets flooded with awkwardly placed blocks. Good luck!
Doodle Dates is a visual novel dating simulation (kind of) made by Nick Lives, a solo dev out of the United States with a penchant for the bizarre in his work. Case and point, players follow a version of themselves approaching their eighteenth birthday with summer finished and nothing to do, only to be suddenly dragged into their old doodle book by a drawing named Claire to reside and find their true love.
I won’t lie, this is the weirdest isekai I’ve ever watched/played (for legal reasons, this is a joke).
Players will be following the story of themselves as they draw items necessary for the story to continue forward, either instructed to by Claire or to service the scenario at hand. As seen above, my drawing skills are weak at best, which leads me into the game’s greatest strength; how utterly bizarre it feels to be interacting with drawings created by myself. Flirting with a drawing that looks like it was made by myself back in high school feels super weird yet hilarious to do, and Doodle Dates definitely leans in to just how absurd the situation is. There’s no metric for quality, so the plot always assumes in a specific way about what the picture is. Heck, you could draw essentially anything as Sketchy (the date) and they would act in the same way. Anything drawn has the possibility of showing up either immediately or later on, and I could not say which was funnier to witness; my own drawings being utilized by others I made, or being used by the few assets created by Nick Lives to just contrast the quality.
Granted, if the drawings were the only nonsensical aspect of Doodle Dates it would be a relatively funny game, but not nearly as ridiculous as it is currently — for the plot itself further adds to the absurdity. Without spoiling the events within, the doodles all have a serious issue relating to their Creator that causes them to question much of their emotional state and purpose. This gets explored while the Creator — the player — is also stuck within the world and making decisions based on the visual novel pop outs. Each choice made leans in to the weird tendencies that comes with imagination, constantly adding to the scene until it culminates in a truly bizarre ending that can only be described as ‘I keep laughing at how weird this is, but I’m still laughing’. There’s even multiple endings to witness the events depending on which choices players make at key moments, which all lead to just outlandish finales to round them out.
It’s dark, it’s weird, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. Doodle Dates carved out its own niche in this sense of drawing your own visual novel characters and props to continue the story while leaning in to the absurdity and including meta-commentary about the whole ordeal. It can get somewhat mature depending on the route, so I don’t think I’d recommend it to kids wanting to draw in their video games, but adults that want to experience a confusingly hilarious adventure? This will definitely be an hour or less to remember for many, many reasons.
