Million Onion Hotel
Developer/publisher Onion Games KK Format Android, iOS (both tested) Release Out now
Android, iOS
Dispel any thoughts of Yoshiro Kimura tempering his more eccentric tendencies. If anything, Million Onion Hotel is even weirder than Dandy Dungeon, from the kazoo melodies and jazz-piano backing of its title screen theme to a climactic battle against a colossal, bubble-blowing fish. Again, however, it’s deceptively clever, a veneer of gaudy strangeness belying a puzzle game of quiet ingenuity that soon becomes captivating.
Inside the eponymous establishment lies a 5x5 grid, from which onions steadily sprout, leaving behind a red square when tapped. Form a red line in any direction and a clock will drop, refilling the ticking timer at the top of the screen and advancing you one level. But, as you’ll soon discover, single lines aren’t enough. No matter how much they glow and wiggle, you need to resist the natural temptation to play whack-an-onion and instead set up the board so you can make two or three lines with a single tap, while ensuring you don’t wait too long for a kind drop.
Those doubles and triples will whisk you off to space, where fruits of increasing value pop up. Patience and good fortune may well earn you a quadruple – or a miracle, in the game’s parlance – which grants you yet more time to build your score. Oh, and to amass a horde of knights, which you’ll need to tackle the bosses that pop up every 20 levels. You’ll need all your fingers to launch them in a group before the guardian puts up a barrier, before leaping off screen and slamming down, taking huge chunks off the clock.
With practice, you’ll amass enough time and firepower in advance to finish them off before they can launch too many attacks, and to comfortably withstand the ones they do land. But as the levels rise, miracles are harder to come by. Brushes that sweep the red from marked tiles require a few taps to remove; you’ll need plenty more to pluck out giant asparagus. Giggling onion-eaters roll around the edges of the board, helping you fill specific squares but turning nasty if you ignore them. And then you have unruly guests throwing objects from upstairs windows; to protect your patch, you’ll need to hold your finger down to open a parasol and bounce the missiles clear. Well, obviously.
There’s a familiar sense of escalation, whereby the visual noise steadily increases until you find you’re playing on instinct, your fingers somehow making sense of the chaos when it all becomes too much for your eyes to take in. In that regard, it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that if Jeff Minter went to Japan and made a puzzle game, it might look something like this. There aren’t many bigger compliments we could pay to this endearingly odd, memorable little game.