Saturday Casual Gaming 246: Pocket Forest

In Which I Slide and Match Three

I like me some mobile games - especially when they're free! Pocket Forest is an offering from developer Battle Mango and available on the Google Play Store.

But it's far more complicated than it first appears!

Pocket Forest has a lot going for it. It's a match-3 game, which I love, but it's also a sliding tiles game, which means that in order to match three of the same image (dirt, grass, water; fox, tree, droplet, and up), you have to slide rows and columns until images match up. Oh, and you have limited moves with which to slide! Thankfully, tapping the groups of three or more doesn't take a move from your pool.

Now, as if that wasn't enough to keep track of just in the gameplay, tiles can interact! If you match 3 water tiles of the same level, they'll water the tiles around them! Dirt tiles will become grass tiles (which is annoying if you're trying to get more animal tiles!), tree or plant tiles (but not grass tiles) bear fruit that will automatically be fed to any directly adjacent animals, netting you extra points! I have only played the first zone and haven't filled the Bestiary yet, and I'm already addicted.

Oh, I didn't mention the Bestiary?

Yeah, there's a Bestiary!

A fairly extensive Bestiary, too!

I'm pretty sure the above image is from an older build of the game, but! It shows basically what happens.

You play your level until you run out of moves (and by the way, tiles will auto-merge if they're next to each other at the end of a level, so you can use that to your advantage!), and at the top, you'll see three stars. Each star fills as you gain points, and they represent the potential rarity of animals you'll encounter as a reward. My first animal was a sweet little fox, and one of the cool aspects of this sticker-style collection is that you get to pet the animals.

Ever wanted to pet a brown bear?

Now you can! And without getting mauled, no less!

Now, you can only pet them once, sadly... until you find a duplicate! I have my little lizard 100% petted, and it gave me a bonus!

Actually, pretty much everything nets you bonuses in this game, so if you're having a hard time in real life and you just need a win, however, small, you can almost certainly squeak one out while playing this game for less than 10 minutes. Bonuses are usually buffs for in-game (like a button which places animals on all dirt tiles available, a button to water every tile at once, and a button to plant one tree anywhere on a grassy tile), but sometimes you'll get tickets!

There are two types of tickets - normal tickets and golden tickets! I haven't had much luck with the one Golden Ticket I got - it just gave me more boosters (and once you hit 50+ of the same booster, getting more boosters is not that thrilling), but I know it can get you other things, like new skins for your tiles!

I actually wound up getting rewarded with a Cactus skin for my plants, so now my foxes eat cactus fruits when it rains! I got that as a level bonus for collecting a certain amount of animals :)

Battle Mango did a great job on this game, and it's cute and fun, so if you're looking for a feel-good game, definitely check out Pocket Forest!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC