Why chain reactions feel so good

It is really nice to have a chain reaction in almost any game and especially in puzzle games. They make puzzle games more dynamic and unpredictable and fun. We cannot imagine a game that would not benefit from one. You make one right move and then you just watch things happening very fast one by one, like a little wave going through the board. We think this is one of the most satisfying feelings a puzzle can give you. That is why almost every puzzle game we make has a chain reaction.

Take Clean! for example. If you don’t know it yet: the board is full of coloured hexagonal tiles, tapping a tile changes its colour and when three or more tiles of the same colour connect, they disappear. Now let’s say you have two tiles of the same colour and one tile of another colour in the middle, and then again two tiles of the same colour. If you change that middle one, all five tiles pop together. You plan one small move and get a much bigger result. It feels great every time.

Hex Sense has its own version of this, the same way as Minesweeper does. If you click somewhere where a big part of the field is empty, the whole area unravels in front of you, tile after tile and the board opens up on its own. This is so satisfying to see every time! When we added an animation of open tiles’ progress particles flying into the progress bar with a juicy sound, it became even better.

But so far the best chain reactions we have are in Catch’n’Merge. To really feel it you have to try playing the game yourself. But let me try to describe it. First you catch falling creatures and then drop them into the flask, where matching creatures merge into bigger ones. And if you drop a creature in the right spot, it happens more often than you would expect - creatures start merging, and merging, and merging. One merge sets off the next one - because a creature of that tier happens to be just nearby, and that one sets off another - again, because the creature in that tier happened to be near. Combined with the sounds, the animation and the progress you see in the flask, this is just amazing to watch.

For now the only game of ours without chain reactions is Smartle. And it makes sense because Smartle is a daily word puzzle and there are not a lot of chain reactions you can do with words. Maybe the closest thing to a chain reaction there is when you swap letters to form a word and suddenly build the second word in the row where you grabbed the letter - that’s pretty cool, we even added an achievement for this called “Two birds, one swap”. It is a small surprise moment and we like it a lot, but it is not really a chain.

Why do chain reactions feel so good? We think it is because the game gives you back more than you expect. You made one small move and got much more than you planned.

We are curious about your experience. What is the best chain reaction you ever had in one of our games, or in any game at all? Tell us in our Discord server, we read everything there.

And if you want to make some chain reactions yourself, try Clean! or Catch’n’Merge - they are free games and you can play them right in your browser.