Zen Fashion embodies what we love about the best casual games: Simple to learn and infinitely entertaining. There's nothing terribly original about matching games, but that doesn't mean a good one can't be hella fun to play. In the case of
Zen Fashion, you'll find a few interesting things that bring it out from the crowd. The first element is that not every tile is priority for matching, but all tiles get into play eventually. What happens on a typical game board in
Zen Fashion is that you'll see tiles with symbols. As long as you can match three, you'll cause the tiles to drop off the board. Other tiles will take their place, but not as "active" tiles. The active tiles are all you need to match in order to win, but sometimes you'll want to build combos from both active and inactive tiles. Other times you'll need to build these combos for the simple reason that churning tiles is necessary to make a match on a critical tile. The idea of matching three doesn't mean you are limited to only matching three. Instead of doing shifting tiles,
Zen Fashion lets you trace a line between tiles on a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal axis. You can't trace a tile twice, but you can be creative and make some interesting patterns. Points are scored in relation to how many tiles you draw into your combo, which makes it worth your while to get crazy with the number of maximum stops.
Further into Zen Fashion, you'll notice that the outfits you unlock have some strange symbols attached that relate to special powers. These are the power-ups we associate with games like this, but are contained in the clothing rather than embedded in the board. Located on the board are special combo tiles that gradually fill a collector at the top of the screen; collect enough and you'll be able to launch some of those special items. The mechanic is not only poorly defined, but doesn't come in handy that often. It takes too long to accrue and the net impact isn't enough to turn the tide of a single board any more than pure luck. The difference is when you really, really need to eliminate a single tile and can't do it within your time limit. At these moments a power-up is useful, but the system should have been much simpler.
