Pretty Girls Tile Match – Review

I’m continuing my Pretty Girl binge with Pretty Girls Tile Match, the high-paced mahjong game with a twist.

For those who don’t know the classic tile game mahjong, the aim of is to clear a board of patterned tiles by matching tiles with the same pattern and removing them. PG Tile Match builds on the basic gameplay by asking you to match three tiles instead of two while giving you a host of bonus skills to help you. You also have a hand or tray to put up to seven tiles in, this means you can collect several different sets at once, building into a strategy.

You have four skills, each linked to trigger and face buttons. You can undo your last move, hold a tile, shuffle the board and move a tile into your hand. There’s also a “Limit Time” which will move a tile into your hand should you fail to match three tiles within the limit. All the while, the timer continues and the scores stack up, as fast matches earn bonus points.

There are six pretty girls for you to challenge, each with 20 unique puzzle levels. These levels start off pretty basic but soon increase in difficulty with more complicated layouts and patterns to match. I didn’t find myself struggling too much to complete the levels, with the majority of levels lasting a few minutes at most, but they were very fun and easy to get sucked into.

The background music on the title and game select screens has no right being so good! I’ve had it running throughout the writing of this review and the Kawaii Pop, future-core, EDM mix is a total bop. This changes when in puzzles to something a little more subdued, but I think it’s in-keeping with the focus of the match.

The dressing room function returns, offering two changes of clothing for your pretty girls and a stage to place them in. Again, this is largely pointless but the unlocked outfits will appear on the home screen. However, the beauty of the Pretty Girls games comes from their simple yet addictive gameplay and the girls themselves are largely there to build into the kawaii pop styles. Do I wish they’d animate the mouths with the dialogue and be a little extra? Sure, but the art is cute and I’m generally not in the levels long enough to find it irritating.

For a few quid, Pretty Girls Tile Match is a great entry in the franchise and an easy Platinum to boot. The “three-way twist” is a nice change from the usual mahjong gameplay. It came out September last year and can be picked up on the PlayStation, Switch and PC.