Generations

Generations is a match-three puzzle game about hanging pictures on the wall. There’s no time limit or speed element – it’s all about thinking hard, planning ahead, and a healthy helping of luck.

It took me just a few minutes to figure out what I’m really supposed to be doing, but, like all good puzzle games, it’s endlessly replayable, and the Catalog version has online leaderboards so you can see how you match up with others across the world. My first game was a solid half-hour or so, and I got around 3,000 points before I had to run off and take care of my real-life cat. I can’t imagine how long a 75,000-point game would take, but I admire the dedication!

First, the mechanics. You have a wall, and you just start hanging pictures. Match three (or more!) pictures of the same generation, and they merge and age up one rank. So it goes from stork, to baby, to child, to teen, to parent, to grandparent. Make matches and you sometimes get a bonus picture worth extra points that you can save in your back pocket to use whenever. Match three grandparents and you’ve completed a generation; this gives you a lot of points. Rinse and repeat for as long as you can.

The trickiest part is knowing where to place frames so they’ll merge where you want. Say you have two baby portraits. If you link them with a third, the two already there will disappear, and the one you just placed will level up into a child. You can’t move pictures once they’re already on the wall, so the only way to organize your space and make room for more pictures is by matching, and they’ll only match into a convenient place if you plan ahead. The in-game hints recommend doing L-shapes, and that makes a lot of sense once you get in there and play around.

It's very forgiving at first, as a lot of your pictures will just be storks and babies, which are easy to match with each other. Oh, and you can only place a picture by one that’s already on your wall, so your usable space is constantly in flux. As you play longer, you’ll occasionally get older pictures without having to level them up. A free grandparent without having to go through five levels of growth can save your game!

At first I was a little confused by what was a child and what was a teen, but the game uses matching backgrounds like in the Game Boy version of Zoop to help you differentiate them clearly. Once you get the hang of it, Generations is a game you could play for literally hours in a row. There’s also a bunch of achievements to hunt for, and some ask a whole lot out of you. But that’s just another reason to keep coming back. We’ve been playing Tetris for like 40 years. Maybe we could also play this game for… generations?

(Released October 3, 2022, on Itch and May 23, 2023, on Catalog. Also on iPhone!)