Review: Tiny Biomes (Nintendo Switch)

With Tiny Biomes, eastasiasoft and Double Mizzlee have brought us a gentle puzzler that’s better at helping you chill out than it is at providing a challenge. That can be OK sometimes, but this game still needed a little more effort.

You can see from the screenshots pretty much everything you get with Tiny Biomes. It’s that brain teaser where you need to spin blocks in order to create a flow from a starting point to an endpoint (or endpoints, as is mostly the case here).

You’ll often see this as a mini-game in other puzzle adventures, or it can stand alone as an arcade action game with a greater sense of urgency. Tiny Biomes asks the premise to stand alone without that urgency, and it only does the job if you’re willing to dive deeply into it.

The problem is that the general gameplay is too easy. That path is already set, you just need to spin blocks to connect the tubes. You do this by selecting them and tapping A. Advance the flow block by block and you’ll quickly reach the end. Next level. There are three biomes to play through, each containing 50 puzzles. That creates a problem.

The beginning puzzles in each biome are far too easy. And by beginning, I mean more than the first half of them. You can easily work through 25+ puzzles in just a few minutes without coming close to dropping a star rating.

Things get more challenging—and therefore fun—as the block count increases. The more you have to spin, the greater the chance you’ll send the flow off in the wrong direction. All puzzles can eventually be solved with trial and error, but you’re judged by the amount of moves you take to complete them.

So, great. Things got good at the end of the forest biome. But when I moved on to another, I was back to the ridiculously easy content and a grind of about 30 levels before things started to get fun again.

You can bounce between the biomes at will, and I suggest you do that—five or ten at a time, then a change in scenery.

That’s a lesser problem, too. The different biomes incorporate different colors and obstacles, but the background and music remain the same. It’s all pleasant enough—the gentle animations and music create a relaxing atmosphere—but it all gets quite redundant quite quickly.

And with no leaderboards or achievements beyond the already easy to obtain three-star rating, there’s no real incentive to keep at it.

All that said, I acknowledge there’s room for cozy puzzle games like this. Sometimes brain teasers should do just that—tease, not overwhelm. At that, Tiny Biomes succeeds, and it does it for only $5.00. Those looking for a gentle puzzler to relax with before bed will find it here, let’s just hope it doesn’t take you long to fall asleep.