I can't play watermelon game Suika's free PC clone anymore, because the fruits all look too goddamn sad

Puzzle game Suika, or 'That Watermelon Game', is currently having a bit of a moment online. It's been available on Switch for a couple of years now in Japan, but this week it received an English eShop version, and it's taken off a bit with streamers and Twitch folk. It's also spawned dozens of clones, including an unofficial free web browser version that I've been giving a go over the last couple of lunch times to see what all the fuss is about. It's a neat little time waster. It's a teensy bit different to the proper Switch version, but the basic concept is the same: it's a essentially physics-based fruit Tetris meets Threes, where you're dropping similar-looking fruits on top of one another to combine them into even larger fruits.

The goal is to combine them enough times to get the big watermelon for mega points, but honestly, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep playing this free version of Suika, because so many of the fruits you meet along the way to the watermelon just look so gosh darn sad that it's breaking my heart a little. Then again, if I was a pear, I'd probably have a pretty sour-looking face, too, if I'm honest.

The proper version has much happier-looking little fruit lads, and honestly, at just £2.69 (or $3 for US folks), I should just go ahead and buy it so I don't have to worry about the psychological implications of what's going on inside these unofficial fruit balls' brains.

Seriously, look at these miserable lads. Who hurt the orange, why does the dekopon (a seedless satsuma, in case you were wondering) look so depressed? Is he sad that the free version has chopped off his weird little nubbin on top of his head for a clean, rounded shave? Wikipedia tells me that the 'deko' part of his name actually means convex in Japanese as a reference to its tiny noggin bump, so the fact it's been sheared straight off in the efforts of making a quick advertising buck is probably precisely why he's so dejected. Pineapple boy doesn't look too with it either - although who can blame him, when he, too, has been stripped naked of his spiky prongs and forced into another spherical skin sack?

The strawberries, I get. Strawberries are delicious and they have every right to be cheeky-cheery. Maybe they're secretly glad to be rid of their pyramid shape and join the pantheon of their more symmetrical, rounded brethren. Cherries are small and adorable by nature, though the grapes look like they've just woken up from a long nap - perhaps an induced coma that was performed in order to separate them into individual purple poppets, unlike the fully-formed bunch of grapes available in the official Suika...

Really, I should have known something was up with these disturbed fruits as soon as I saw the peach. It's chuffing bright pink, for crying out loud, which just straight up isn't right. And what's with the apple's toothy grin as well? That souless, dead-eyed stare and gnashing grin has to be hiding something. The melon, on the other hand, has just had enough, so bamboozled by the state of his own existence that he's simply given up trying to suss things out. Only the watermelon seems to take any joy in this whole endeavour, but I bet that's because he's what everyone's been lusting over this entire time. His meteoric rise to popularity is why they're all here in the first. He's the top dog, err... food stuff. Of course, he's going to be pleased as punch about it.

Really, the kindest thing you can do for these poor fruits is to go and indulge in the happier, altogether more delightful eShop version. I mean, it's no Holedown, but what is?