League of Mermaids

I have a soft spot for casual games that bother to think past the grid, and League of Mermaids is genuinely trying something different from the swap-two-tiles formula that saturates the genre. Rather than sliding jewels around a board, you fire pearls downward from a shooter at the top of the screen, and those pearls behave like actual objects: they roll, bounce, and resist settling wherever you'd like them to go. The physics layer is the whole pitch here, and for a game this small, it commits to the idea honestly. The campaign follows mermaid Cora and her companions Mishell, Koh, and Marina as they recover Sacred Treasures before the Kraken surfaces and destroys their city. The story is delivered in static illustrated scenes with printed text, and it is absolutely as thin as that sounds. Nobody is playing League of Mermaids for the narrative. What holds attention, at least for a while, is the level design: boards shift from smooth bowl-like structures that keep pearls rolling freely to peg-filled floors that arrest movement, with gates, windmills, and other obstacles complicating your drop angle on later stages. Each level offers three challenges, and three-starring them requires clearing the board, beating the timer, and hitting an additional condition simultaneously, which is harder than the breezy presentation implies. The modes extend the runtime past the three main story chapters. A Bottomless Trench mode tasks you with descending 1000 metres of falling pearls under a time limit, functioning something like a vertical endurance run. Zen Pearls mode strips out the pressure entirely and lets you drop at your own pace. Both sit unlocked from the start, so you are never locked out of them. The hand-drawn underwater artwork is genuinely pleasant, and the audio lands in that mellow, aquatic ambient space that casual games do well when they are not trying too hard. It is repetitive after an hour, but it is the right kind of repetitive for background play. The honest problems: the physics, which are the entire reason to play, can work against you in frustrating ways. Pearls do not always land where logic suggests they should, and several levels feel like they hinge on fortune rather than skill. A left click fires, a right click swaps the two held pearls, and that is essentially the full mechanical vocabulary. There is no help system to speak of, so some of the power-up triggers and explosion conditions are things you stumble into rather than learn. Community feedback also flagged that the physics feel inconsistent enough to occasionally undermine the puzzle logic the game is built on. For a genre that lives or dies on that satisfying click of a well-planned match, unpredictability is a real cost. If you are the person who finds an hour of gentle, tactile dropping-and-matching restorative rather than dull, this delivers that with a colorblind mode, achievements to chase, and enough board variety to stay interesting through its modest runtime. If you want your casual puzzle games to reward precise planning over trial and error, the physics looseness will irritate more than it delights. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 3 ProtonDB community reports.

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