Is it possible to get better at Suika Game? Maybe not

polygon.com:

I’ve played roughly 150 hours of Suika Game, and instead of getting better at the game, I think I’m getting worse. Like my colleague Julia Lee, Suika Game has had me in an absolute chokehold. From Japanese developer Aladdin X, Suika Game was originally available only on the Japanese eShop, but it came stateside in October. I started playing it in December, and since then, it’s basically the only game I’ve played on the Nintendo Switch.

Suika Game is one of those games that’s deceptively simple-looking: You just drop varying sizes of fruits into a box, with fruits combining when two of the same kind touch. The goal is to combine fruits while organizing them in such a way (Tetris-style, almost) that you don’t overflow the box they’re in. Cherries combine to form strawberries, strawberries into grapes, grapes into oranges, oranges into persimmons, persimmons into apples, and so on, up until you reach the titular “suika” (Japanese for watermelon). When two watermelons combine, they disappear, meaning the game can theoretically go on forever as the box gets clear. The only problem is that Suika Game is ridiculously hard, thanks to its physics system that makes fruit bounce all over the place. (Plus, it’s just hard to organize the fruit correctly!)

Once I realized how hard Suika Game was, I set two goals for myself — to reach a score of 3,000, and to get a watermelon touch. I’ve been slowly descending into madness as I look to meet that achievement. When you load up Suika Game and look at the global leaderboards, you’ll see there are people who’ve scored up past 14,000 — an absolutely impossible score for the average player. My journey to reaching 3,000 points has been a huge feat for me, let alone having two watermelons touch.

My current theory is that there’s a skill plateau for Suika Game. The location of that plateau is different for every player, but wherever it is, it’s impossible to go beyond that. I’ve met my skill plateau, and no training has helped me overcome