A Fruit-Switching Puzzle Game That Needs More Flavour
You can play a fun game of ‘guess the ability’ with Sintropia Fruits Together. Each of the three fruits in the game – banana, grape and apple – have a strength that makes them different from the others. Imagine Lost Vikings and you are mostly there, as this is a platformer at heart.
Jotted your answers? Well, the banana can float on updrafts. It’s unpeeled a little at the top and fashioned the frayed ends into a helicopter – a helicopter of its own skin (shiver). You should worry if you got that one correct.
The grape is small. Small means that it can sidle into tiny gaps. You may have got that one right. Sintropia Fruits Together also says that it can jump higher than the other fruits, but it seemed to be the same across the board from our experience.
The apple? It’s the ‘all-rounder’, which is a polite way of saying that it can’t float, can’t squeeze into small gaps, and has no distinguishing features. We’re going to use that phrase if our children don’t excel in something. You’re an ‘all-rounder’.
A Puzzle Game That’s A Bit Of An All-Rounder
These three fruits are your companions for Sintropia Fruits Together. It’s a 2D platformer where the aim is to reach some kitchen scales, presumably to be weighed and eaten. In a large proportion of levels, that means working together: you need to switch between characters to navigate platforms, fans and tunnels, with the aim of positioning every last fruit on the scales.
Collectible stars are ensconced in the level as pick-ups. They tempt you into additional feats, as they’re often too high for some characters, or dangling over a precipice. Achievements give you a reason to pursue them. There’s 2000G on offer for full completion, which won’t take you more than an hour.
I grew up on Lost Vikings, so I was immediately onboard with Sintropia Fruits Together. I love a platformer where the slider moves away from twitchy, precise platforming and more towards puzzling. They’re not all that common, as both platforming and puzzle games have had a dip in popularity in recent times.
Sintropia Fruits Together brushed up against the itch rather than scratching it. That’s largely in part to a half-hearted commitment to the three different characters. You only get more than one character to tinker with at the halfway point, which was a little too late for me. Up to that point, Sintropia Fruits Together is a relatively generic puzzle-platformer, and it needed an extra something to give it substance. We get that the characters need to be tutorialised individually, but we didn’t need our hands to be in kid gloves for that long.
The Switcheroo
When character-switching does finally come in, it’s a little meek. The characters aren’t especially different from each other. Sure, the banana can float on updrafts created by fans, but the other two needed better identities. We wanted each character to feel fundamentally different to control.
The chosen abilities are also a little on the nose. Who are you going to choose to pass through the tiny tunnel? Well, the grape of course. It’s less Lost Vikings and more LEGO games circa 2015, as you hit upon a door that can only be opened by another character. So you switch and move on. There’s no problem-solving in that approach. The puzzles are self-evident.
What is left is some lukewarm puzzles and platforming. Some of the leaps are a little taxing, and a couple of the later levels have you scratching your head around which fruit to use in which order. There are only a few permutations, so the levels don’t take too long to solve, but it’s possible to burble out a curse-word and retry the level because you’ve made a mistake.
On occasions, the mistakes aren’t your fault. Sintropia Fruits Together is hard to read, with some platforms looking like background art, and vice versa. There are switches that stay pressed, and some that don’t, but they all look the same. A legibility pass would have helped here.
Misplaced Expectations
Perhaps it was my fault for imagining that Sintropia Fruits Together was something that it was not. I’d put up some ‘Welcome home, Lost Vikings!’ banners and set my expectations in the wrong place. But I do think I have some justification. If character-switching is what sets your game apart, then you should probably embrace it. But the characters overlap too greatly; the puzzles don’t leave you guessing about which character to use.
And where is the co-op? A team-based platformer cries out for multiplayer, but Sintropia Fruits Together’s budget can’t quite cover it.
Fruity!
There is very little that is offensive about Sintropia Fruits Together, and it refreshes for an hour or so. But we had such high hopes for it, with the promise of character-switching and puzzles that derived from that mechanic. But the characters are much-of-a-muchness and the puzzles don’t leverage their differences at all.
As a puzzle-platformer, Sintropia Fruits Together is a mid-tier fruit. A pear, maybe. But it could have been a top-tier fruit. With a little extra spark, it could have been a strawberry.
Important Links
Sintropia: Fruits Together Rolls Onto Xbox And PC With A Colourful Twist On Puzzle Solving – https://www.thexboxhub.com/sintropia-fruits-together-rolls-onto-xbox-and-pc-with-a-colourful-twist-on-puzzle-solving/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sintropia-fruits-together/9P4WB9PWZN2R/0010
Or get it for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sintropia-fruits-together-xbox-one/9NTM5N2QFTTZ/0010
There’s a PC version too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sintropia-fruits-together-windows/9P3SN7WSM91G/0010
