Puzzlejuice

In Puzzlejuice, the player turns falling tetrominos into letters, and those letters into words and points. The player taps and drags on the touchscreen to rotate and position multicolored tetrominos that fall from the top of the screen. When the player completes a solid row of tiles, or arranges the fallen blocks such that four or more like-colored tiles touch, the color tiles turn into letters. Players connect these letter tiles with their eight adjacent tiles (in ordinal directions) to make words.

Words of sufficient length are cleared from play as well as their adjacent tiles—thus longer words clear more blocks. The iPhone version shows a magnified version of the tile obscured by the player's finger near the finger. The game has been compared to a cross between Boggle, Tetris, and tile-matching.

Puzzlejuice was built by a group called Collaboratory and later renamed Sirvo. The three-person team consisted of programmer Asher Vollmer, artist Greg Wohlwend, and composer Jimmy Hinson. The game began as Vollmer's idea. He later reached out to Wohlwend for aesthetic advice, which resulted in a 365-message chain email and the final product.

Wohlwend and Vollmer did not speak a word to each other—or use a medium outside of Gmail and Twitter—throughout the entire development process. The title was inspired by what Vollmer described as the "EXTREME" American culture of the 1990s, exemplified by the board game Crossfire and juice-filled Gushers fruit snacks. A similar game, Spelltower, was released during Puzzlejuice's development, but Vollmer and Wohlwend ultimately considered their game sufficiently different to proceed. Puzzlejuice was selected for the PAX 10, a spotlighted group of indie games, in July 2012.

The game received "generally favorable" reviews, according to video game review score aggregator Metacritic. Multiple reviewers compared its core mechanics to a combination of Boggle, Tetris, and a tile-matching game, such as Bejeweled or Puyo Puyo. Comparing word games, Edge called it the "fast-paced action-adventure" to Spelltower's "survival horror". Multiple reviewers mentioned the difficulty in mentally balancing the various components of the game, which VideoGamer.com compared to "doing open heart surgery while playing Dance Dance Revolution".

Edge suggested playing on the game's hardest difficulty, which they found the most engaging. They called it "mayhem, ... elegantly handled". Pocket Gamer's Harry Slater said the game "forces your brain to think in ways that it's never been asked to before".