Path frenzy

The room is filled with plastic chairs. On a nearby table, a fresh pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies are waiting for guests to partake. People affixing nametags to themselves are starting to trickle in, mulling around and waiting to get started.

It’s not a group for gamblers or even alcoholics—it’s for addictive games. And while you probably won’t find a community-funded program for this sort of thing in your neighborhood, once you start playing Droplitz, it’ll be a fantasy you’ll want to believe.

On the surface, Droplitz doesn’t look like much—a series of discombobulated pipes thrown up on a screen with little balls (“droplitz”) falling down on them. To a passerby, it might look a little odd. What’s the appeal of creating paths out of pipes for balls to fall to safety?

But if your thought process stops there, you’ve clearly missed the point. It may look simple, but it’s the rush of creating said paths that will drive you to play more. Higher combo strings and points can still, amazingly, be surprisingly effective motivational devices for an arcade-style experience.

Not that it’s all that easy. Droplitz lulls you into a false sense of security in its earliest boards with relatively small numbers of the straight, Y- and X-shaped pipes or “dials” that rotate and snap together. The more paths you can make out of dials, the more droplitz you collect.

Each board contains three or four catchers at the bottom of the screen to collect the finite supply of droplitz, which are only replenished by the bonus supply rewarded for good collection yields. On top of that, a safe path is disposed of once bonus droplitz are collected.

At its easiest, creating separate paths or even networking multiple paths together makes it easy to achieve high scores with combos due to the relatively small number of dials on screen. But Droplitz ramps up quickly, either through the droplitz’s speed, the number of dials on the board or both. And the more pieces there are on the board, the harder it is to create a complete path with no problems.

Still, the game’s addictive power can’t be denied. Becoming obsessed with piecing together as many combos as you can is a given, but learning to outsmart the computer by trying to plug as many holes in your path (thus saving more droplitz) or even preemptively creating new paths before old ones disappear becomes the real challenge.

Pursuing these quests (not to mention unlocking additional modes, which can require some training) will keep you busy for a long time. Actually, hours will likely fly by without you even noticing. For an arcade puzzler, the game has the power to conceivably destroy one’s grades, social life and even relationships. At the very least, sitting down with Droplitz can leave one wondering just where the hell the day went. I don’t think anyone will ever top Tetris for sheer addictiveness, but for a contemporary puzzle game, Droplitz should still be used responsibly. Then again, you may be having too much fun for restraint.

Still don’t believe me? Try it yourself. I dare you.