Droplitz is Atlus’ first downloadable casual game, and like Roogoo, it’s an addictive, yet unheralded action-puzzler that takes a simple gameplay mechanic and makes it sing.

The premise is simple: you’re given a board full of rotatable pipes with various shapes, such as H curves, V curves and U pipes. Droplets drip from the open pipes at the top of the board, and you must arrange the pipes so that they have a continuous downward path to the wells below. Each drop that doesn’t find a well ticks away from the meter on the left. When all the droplets are gone, it’s game over. Creating a path to a well causes a special purple drop to travel down the now-unrotatable path to the well – when the purple drop hits the well, it replenishes the meter with the droplets travelling, erases the pipes and puts new ones up. All the meantime, the player must make sure that the other droplets coming from other open pipes aren’t wasted.

Simple enough mechanic, but what makes it work are the multiple pathways. The purple drop doesn’t appear right away, deliberately giving the player a chance to find more pathways, either merging the other pipe paths into one well, or splitting paths to multiple wells. It doesn’t matter how short the split or merge is, it adds to the multiplier. In addition, quickly creating new paths as the other one is about to disappear can ramp up the multiplier to insane levels – 20X, 30X, and so forth. When you’re on a roll in this game, there’s nothing sweeter than keeping the combos coming.

The game has a clean but eyepleasing look, with soothing music, until you’re down to one or two droplets – which causes a thumping heartbeat as you try desperately to ferry that lone drop of water to a good home. It also comes with two additional game modes: zen, which is basically a marathon mode, and powerup mode, in which powerups appear to apply different effects (ie. freezing the board). If there’s only one caveat, it’s that one can only unlock the two game modes and additional boards with high scores.

Overall, Droplitz is the best downloadable action-puzzler since Plants Vs. Zombies, and highly recommended, especially for fans of Pipe Dreams.