Pretty Girls Klondike Solitaire Plus – Review

Solitaire hails from the 18th century and has been a staple of gaming since the very first consoles and home PCs. So naturally, there are several Pretty Girl iterations of this classic game, the latest to cross my path being Pretty Girls Klondike Solitaire Plus.

I didn’t actually play the first version of this one before (it’s on my list) but I did play the Four Kings Solitaire, which was a super fun take on the format. Klondike Solitaire is more the vanilla version of Solitaire, except you have a bunch of tools to help you complete the game.

There are four tools – hint, shuffle, expose and undo – and you get more uses of these depending on the difficulty of the level. Hint and undo are pretty self-explanatory, but expose (I assume they named it to be suggestive) reveals a face-down card to help you, and shuffle mixes the face-down cards on the board with your deck

I found myself working mostly with the expose and shuffle as the hints could get a little confusing, especially if you’re on your way to losing. I would reveal what I could from the board, expose one, and then keep going until I had no choice but to shuffle. This strategy worked well for me but I’m sure there are others.

There are ten girls to choose from, each with easy, normal and hard, plus the option between drawing one and drawing three cards. The timer is mostly for your own appeasement or to measure against people online, but you get a combo-point bonus if you string a bunch of moves together.

On PlayStation, you can move the cursor around the screen with the left joystick and use that to drag stacks but you can also just click cards to initiate a move and there’s a handy auto stack at the end. I’m not a fan of the floating cursor, but the clicker really took the pain away. I imagine the PC version controls with the mouse and that the Switch version lends well to the double tap feature, but cannot say for certain having never played them myself.

You unlock outfits for the dressing room by completing hard mode. It’s not for trophies or anything but the avatar’s clothes will magically change as you near the end of the level which is something I don’t remember seeing before.

The general style and themes of the Pretty Girls franchise carry over into Solitaire Plus. I recognise some characters but they do have different clothes to what I remember if they are similar to previous models. I also noticed more variation in the faces/character models than before.

The character voices are to the general standard of borderline lewd soundbites of Japanese encouragement. I’m still unsure if the pretty girls want me to win the game or not, but I doubt that will change people’s enjoyment of the franchise any.

The musical accompaniment similarly calls back to previous entries, and I really enjoy the upbeat victory sounds over the more subdued themes. These ones, in particular, made me feel like I was sitting in a casino bar/ lounge in VR Chat the game levels, but still hark back to the kawaii-pop fanfares and upbeat tones.

The truest testament to the Pretty Girl games is that I keep playing them after hitting the plat, as I really enjoyed the gameplay. However, anyone looking to achieve platinum will have no trouble cleaning them up within an hour. Not everyone will appreciate the lewdness, but it’s just the set dressing.

Do you need more Pretty Girl games in your life? Probably not, but you’ll have a heckin’ good time playing them. Grab yourself a copy of Pretty Girls Klondike Solitaire Plus today.