Okay shit I might have to confess that hot take.
I'm impressed by Sliding Seas. On the surface it's just some casual childish bejeweldish pay-to-win for android, but if you look deeper, it's... well, yes it's still that. But I'm surprised by how, after a huge lot of levels :
- It still doesn't force you (or makes you want to) buy its dozens of booster thingies. I play at my pace, and win with no trouble without using any of these "actions" that would get replenished by emptying your bank account. I really thought that at some point it would turn into a grind, implicitely forcng you to psy to progress, but it really definitely doesn't.
- It still throws new mechanics at you when you thought that by then you've seen it all.
- The levels are still fun and at some point clearly hand-crafted around new ways to make the environment and mechanics interaction puzzling (like, aha what if there's a column of corals and the pirate ships were all travelling behind it but with mines on their way to give you enough time to intercept them- not a thing that comes from randomized maps).
Anyway, the gameplay is a mix between bejeweled and 2048, you swap tiles to combine them into higher tiers. But the setting is maritime, as you combine shallower water tiles they eventually turn to land, and you have to aim that under the feet of the infinite crew of a shipwreck before they drown. It's nonsensical but satisfying and more strategic than combining tiles anywhere in any order with no other aim than quantity.
Anyway, a "guilty pleasure" in the sense that it belongs to a genre and financial model I'm not too fond of, but still avoids most of the practical reasons I'm not fond of these.