Exhibit A: my current game of GristTorrent, that I was playing through before writing this.
I could have been drawing. I could have been working on my fanadventure. I could have been writing this very article. Instead, I lost two days of my life to GristTorrent. Let me take you on a journey as I try to review this Suika Game clone developed by FlaringK in a single week-end.
As Homestuck Daily's editor in chief, it's my job to stay on top of things when it comes to works coming out of the community. This all started on a Discord server, in which a link to GristTorrent was posted. I, of course, had to click it to see what it was.
And then I think I blacked out for forty-eight hours.
If there's one thing I can say about GristTorrent it is that it allowed me to stop wasting my days playing Suika Game, much like Freud once said cocaine could be used to treat opium addiction. The games may seem to be exactly the same, but there are crucial differences between the two that makes GristTorrent an evil little brain worm to me specifically
The Homestuck aesthetics are of course part of it, but that's just what they are- aesthetics. Suika Game did not have me hooked for so long just because it has fruit, even though I am a known fruit lover. The gameplay may be the same, but as a leading expert in the field of losing entire days of one's life to puzzle games the slight differences in physics clearly put GristTorrent higher on the addictiveness scale.
First, of course, let's get the obvious out of the way: grist isn't round. The grist don't perfectly stack, unlike the almost perfectly smooth circles that make up Suika Game, demanding a much more strategic play style when it comes to placing the pieces together. I've gotten many watermelons in Suika Game, but never once have I gotten a diamond in GristTorrent- and I need it, I desire it, this diamond has become one of my personal white whales. I will not be stopped until I get it to appear on my screen.
The grist are also less bouncy and reactive than Suika Game's colorful fruit, so you will be spending even more time pulling your hair out and screaming "oh, come on!" in anguish as you try to figure out how to make two pieces of ruby fuse because a single artifact is preventing the union by what seemingly looks like a single pixel. This is a good thing if we're measuring how good something is by how much it makes me want to "play just one more game" because "I can definitely do it this time", and to be perfectly clear I absolutely am.
They don't get launched into the stratosphere either, gone are the days of losing because a strawberry decided to fancy itself an astronaut. Even the smallest pieces of grist, which here are artifacts, will firmly refuse to move from wherever you placed them. This once again means you really need to consider grist placement strategically, as you can't rely on a single small piece to push two bigger ones together- the gravitational pull of the bottom of the screen is simply too strong on the shiny gemstones that desire nothing more than to return to the ground.
I was only stopped when Elusive saw my screen and asked what I was playing, to which I answered with sheer despair in my voice by operating a perfect gamer chair turnaround after placing a piece of tar that turned into shale that turned into marble that lodged itself perfectly between two pieces of amber I had on the board. She reminded me of my duty to do something other than play GristTorrent, and so here I am talking about it instead.
Make no mistake, my addiction is far from cured. I will return to ignoring my loved ones the second this article is published. Only play this game if you are absolutely sure you have time for it, and even then I wish you godspeed on your own personal journey of trying to get away from it.