Is this still in the public consciousness? I'm never sure with these fad sort of games how much longterm impact they have for people. Myself, I come back to this every now and again for something to do if I need something mindless as stimulus, like if I'm on the phone and need something to do while I'm listening to keep from falling asleep.

It's easy to see why this ended up being a fad. It is a mathy game, but only in its loosest sense. You're more interested in matching iconography, and if you can keep the patterns straight, you could just as easily swap out those numbers for any other sort of images or glyphs. I do think it becomes a solved puzzle fairly quickly once you find an optimal play (move everything towards a corner, start forming lines so you can easily add everything up in a chain), after which point there isn't much variety to the experience. The only obstacle there is RNG; sometimes you need to move your high corner block to force a 2 or 4 block to spawn, and sometimes that spawn happens where your high block was. I have been screwed over by that more times than I can recall.

I do come back to this fairly often, like I said, since it serves a very specific purpose for me. But generally, when I'm playing this, I'd rather be playing almost anything else.

The first smartphone game I played and got really hooked on for a while. Until I figured out the optimal play and then once I went as far as I could go with it, got bored and uninstalled it in order to avoid wasting more time on its mindless movements.

Then a few days ago I decided to reinstall it to show to a friend and promptly got one of the highest scores I've ever had. But what I found out was that I didn't really care; however, there was something I did care about:

The simple zen-like activity of moving blocks around and getting these little pleasure shots from seeing them merge.

There's nothing much to the game, and it doesn't require much brainwork, but that's exactly what makes it kind of enjoyable when I'm feeling bad and just want to stare at something mindless, lightly lessening the pain in my soul with each box merged on a blandly colourful screen that suits its zen mood.

There's little to recommend here, besides the first high and the following zen, but doesn't that actually sound like quite a lot? I do not know how long I'll be playing it for this time, but as there are enough bad things in one's life to often take one's mood down, I guess I'll soon find out. For now, I'll be doing and playing anything else when I can, and when I cannot, I'll be moving the boxes, each a tiny but potential step closer to peace.

And then, having written that, but before posting, I played a bit more and saw the number climbing higher and higher and found myself excited enough about it that I suddenly wanted to see how far I could go, and just like that, the zen was gone and instead it became a slightly anxious long slog towards every higher numbers where a few wrong moves can suddenly gridlock you to an annoying loss.

After a few days of occasional play, quite unexpectedly, after a few bad moves, that's exactly what happened, and I considered quitting the game for good. Again.

So much for zen.