We’re long past the peak of Suica game. The mobile title that took the world by storm a few years back didn’t manage to retain its pop culture relevance beyond a few weeks. So obviously, Namco, famous for capitalizing on its own pop culture relevance, is giving it another shot with NAMCO LEGENDARY Mountains. With a voxel-aesthetic and a few small tweaks, this is an easy pick-up-and-play puzzle game whether you’re familiar with Namco characters or not.

Each stage is presented as a small bowl. In a loop around the gameplay area, you can toss in orbs containing different voxel characters of classic Namco series. DigDug, Pac-Man, Mappy and Xevious are all present. On top of the screen, there’s a reference to see which orbs need to collide in order to grow into the next phase. Your goal is to keep evolving your orbs to even bigger sizes and avoid them tumbling over the edge. While you can rotate and slightly adjust your angle, I was often struggling with the fact that the camera was locked to the horizontal axis. While there is an indicator for the arc of your throw, it is hard to judge where exactly your orb will land, causing me to lose a good run more often than not. While the Namco aesthetic is pretty fun, it did get a bit too repetitive for me after a while. Depending on the stage, your music and character-roster changes around. In Pac-Man you’ll have to endure the main Pac-Man theme for possibly tens of minutes as you stack up the fruits and ghosts. I do think it is fun that as you keep playing more stages are unlocked, and in particular that you unlock new voxel versions of Namco characters. You can even change the evolution tree to your liking. Want to only have DigDug enemies that slowly blow up? You can manually adjust these as you please. There’s even a little diorama mode to showcase the voxel in a scene, which is cute but nothing too exciting.

Overall NAMCO LEGENDARY Mountains is a neat twist on the Suica game formula. But the presentation is a bit of a mess. Menus are simple, the voxel characters are pretty static and the music gets repetitive fast. However, I cannot deny that I was hooked by the gameplay. Booting it up during short breaks or to have something to play casually while listening to a podcast was fun. It tickles my brain just enough to stay engaged while also being able to zone out for a bit. That does, however, apply to pretty much all Suica-like games. The choice for voxels is a bit of a double edged sword, given the limited field of view and input. Still if you dig a retro feel and some casual gameplay, NAMCO LEGENDARY Mountains is an easy hill to recommend and return to more often than you may expect.