From Puzzle Fighter to Puyo Puyo and beyond, competitive puzzle games are a niche that’s appealed to me for as long as I can remember. I’ve never quite been able to pinpoint why. Maybe it’s that visceral satisfaction of having your combo damage stack up as piles of clutter on the other player’s board; or perhaps it’s the design ingenuity of making an interactive puzzle game work in the first place. In any case, I can trace the cause of my fascination back to a couple titles, and this is the first of them.
Puzzle Bobble was just a joy to sink time to, solo or with friends, and I think this version of the game still holds up as one of the better ones. It’s easy to pick up, tricky to perfect, and is wrapped in a chilled aesthetic of (mostly-)kid-friendly characters and upbeat music that I’ll be humming absent-mindedly until the end of time. With fair warning, the stage song picked out below is the most infectious one on the OST. It’s just a really cheerful and catchy loop, with busy percussion to fit the pace of the game. Short and simple as it is, it sets off my PS1 nostalgia as well as any memorable soundtrack on the system.
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