Parents' Guide to Where Cards Fall

This game does an excellent job of developing and refining its puzzle mechanics over time, even if the story is anti-climactic. While the main systems in Where Cards Fall for moving cards and building houses of cards remain the same, it adds small incremental challenges to scale the puzzle difficulty at a manageable pace. This keeps players from feeling overwhelmed too soon as well as avoiding repetitiveness by changing the look of the stages and the abilities of set pieces (such as a cloud which raises or lowers depending upon how many sets of cards are on top of it). It also helps establish differences between the types of cards. Where Cards Fall proves to be a perfect mobile or Nintendo Switch title due to how easy it is to pick up and put down now and then.

Where Cards Fall is a whimsical yet understated puzzle game, and that balance makes it engaging and enjoyable. But problems arise since this title is marketed as a story-based puzzle game. Though the vignettes are visually pleasing to watch, the overall story doesn't leave a deeply emotional impact. Though the story is linear and follows one character, it's difficult to follow. For instance, because the character models are small and the camera doesn't show any close-up images, the characters are mostly indistinguishable from each other. In addition, the choice to exclude dialogue or subtitles within the story is clearly intentional, but it detracts from any messages being communicated. Finally, the vignettes are too short and spread out to track them from stage to stage. Because only some of them are important to the narrative, this puts additional space between impactful moments. Overall, though these narrative problems don't take away from this being an entertaining, well-designed puzzle game. The story element really misses the mark and deserves to be mentioned simply because the game descriptions focus so much on the plot as a potential draw to players.