Format: 360
Release: Out now
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: In-house

The match-three bug has spread with such speed and insistency across the puzzle game landscape that you’d be forgiven for thinking the genre would never again break free of its permeating colour-coded influence. But Square Enix’s Yosumin Live, a title that first blossomed as a Japanese webgame before jumping to DS in Japan only, is proof that gameplay gems are still to be mined even from gaming’s most excavated ground, and that they needn’t be complex to capture fresh or irresistible.

Visually, Yosumin is as clichéd as any Bejeweled knock-off. A 9x9 grid is filled with cute tokens of, initially, three different colours. However, in contrast to Tetris, Panel De Pon and Zoo Keeper et al, in which you must shift pieces around, here there is a fundamental disconnect between player and board. It’s all about observing the grid presented to you with a certain degree of detachment, trying to pick out patterns and shapes in the lay of the tokens.

The object of the game is to draw a box around like-coloured tokens with a cursor. Only those tokens in the four corners of the square or rectangle shape need be of the same type, and each shape can be as small as four pieces or, if you get lucky, as large as the entire board, a move that earns the titular exclamation of Yosumin! Complete a box and all of the tokens within its boundaries disappear, to be immediately replaced by a fresh set that presents a new gamut of potential shapes to discover. Each level provides a target number of token types or rectangle sizes to collect, criteria that, once met, will see the level completed and your performance scored for time and efficiency.

A relentlessly depleting timer adds urgency to every move and as you progress into the game’s depths, the pressure of having to discern rectangle after rectangle of patterns against the clock reaches fever pitch. As with all the best puzzle game conceits, this anxiety is temporary and always tempered by the delicious pay-off of clearing a stage moments later.

Yosumin Live offers a near endless supply of levels but only a few different modes and extrapolations on the core idea. The multiplayer mode pitches two players against each other on the same grid, intensifying the race dynamic of the core system as each works to find and draw shapes before the other. But away from competitive play, there’s only a single endless mode to work through, one that requires, in archaic meta-game fashion, players to start afresh from the beginning every time they play.

While the game adds new special token types as you progress, from single blocks that can be moved once to any spot on the board to pieces that will cause everything to be reshuffled, it only takes 30 levels before almost of Yosumin Live’s ideas have been revealed. The focus then shifts to high-score challenges, which encourage you to chain shapes and colour types for points multipliers.

The concept at the core of Yosumin Live is robust, but it fails to hold up under extended play. Either Square Enix has happened upon a brilliant mechanic that has yet to fully bloom or one that it has been unable to sustain. The scant progression Yosumin has made in its transition from webgame to XBLA release indicates that perhaps it is the latter. [6]