Every so often I come across a game that I can see myself playing over and over again. Or one, at least, that’s clever and quirky enough to wedge itself into my usual game rotation; given my obsessiveness over games, this is hardly a trifle characteristic. Bad Apples by Metaversal Studios is one such game that’s caught my eye in a good way. In a manner similar to games like Bookworm, Virus Laboratory, and Bejeweled, the objective of Bad Apples is to stack different types of objects atop and adjacent to one another, gathering them in likeness, until a gathering of three or more is created to earn you points. In the case of Bad Apples, the objects to be toyed with are fruit, including blueberries, pineapples, what look to be cherry tomatoes, and, what else? Bad apples.

To win in this game, you must pair together groups of three or more of like fruits – once they pair up, they’ll be juiced, as shown in your gradually increasing collective of juice to the right of the screen. Like any good, fresh squeezed fruit, the juice is bright and cheery looking, just glowing of vitamins and nutrients to make your hair and skin glow (gee, I’m not a juicer at all). In a humorous twist, much like Virus Laboratory, the fruits each wear an expression that gives them a faint, individual character. The pineapple, boasting a heritage from the tropics where he, no doubt, laid in the sun all day working on his glorious tan, dons a blindingly white smile that gives away his excess of bravado and self-confidence. The cherry tomato is squat and bug-eyed, with a goofy smile, a good example of any toy version of its larger fruit. The blueberry, meanwhile, with his frazzled lips and wide-eyed countenance is probably suffering from indigestion, a common side effect of too much Vitamin C. The last characters, the bad apples, are the worst kind of fruit – the spoiling kind, with a fuzzy, green hat of mold, and a foul penchant for making other, nearby fruit go bad and giving you an upset stomach. Nobody likes the bad apples. In this game, they just get in the way of other fruit gathering together, and if bad apples form a trio, then they’ll juice together and you’ll have rotten juice. Thankfully, you can get rid of them with the crusher fruits – which look like the spiky jackfruit, the largest of all fruits, and probably the strongest if they could muscle their way around – who crush any fruit beneath them, friend or foe.

Crushing bad apples earns you +40 points each time, so destroying them is definitely a positive strategy. Otherwise, pairs of three to four of good fruits earn you somewhere in the +120-140 range, which clearly helps you rack up points efficiently. Special fruit characters will appear that correspond to each fruit – blueberry, pineapple, cherry tomato – and when paired with their kin, they will also juice other kin onscreen in one giant whammy of a juicing spree, earning you tons of points. Depending on how well you do each level, you can also earn rewards, which have delightfully clever names that wouldn’t sound out of place at a smoothie or raw bar: fruit salad (to get it, group one of each of the three powerups – special fruit characters – in a single turn), the full bushel, easy as apple pie, fresh squeezed, king of the juice, and more. I rather liked how they threw in Tequila Sunrise, just for kicks. Pesticide is a really helpful award, which you can get by killing five worms using crushers or powerups. There’s really no need to elaborate on the Pesticide – it’s pretty self-explanatory. And, don’t worry about the worms until you upgrade to the full version – they don’t exist in the free version.

The free version is enough to keep me entertained, with three levels of difficulty, an arcade and puzzle mode  (exactly like the puzzle mode in Virus Laboratory), but I really would like to battle worms that rot apples (oh no!), so I’ll probably be upgrading to the full version soon. I recommend you to check it out today.