One of the worst insults you can throw at a video game is to call it an “asset swap.” To say that your work amounts to a fresh coat of paint over something that already existed is, essentially, to say you’ve done nothing. Almost as bad is to call something a “clone,” which implies that you may have done original work, but you’ve failed to iterate upon the inspiration you draw from. There are situations where these pejoratives are appropriate—the flood of “trash” releases on Steam certainly apply—but they’ve become overused to the point that they’ve lost their bite. In the wake of Suika Game’s surprise viral success, a number of games have taken its simple but genius premise (in brief: a sort of physics-based 2048 in which you combine matching objects until you can make the biggest one) and run in their own direction with it. Some are pale imitations with shoddy physics (like Big Watermelon Match), but even games that alter the calculus of gameplay by changing the shapes of the objects or the conditions of the fail state, like PuzzMiX, aren’t immune to being called cheap ripoffs. You would have a hard time criticizing Matsutake Game for being a low effort clone.

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: thematically, it’s absolutely nuts. The playing field appears to be a woven basket, and the objects you’re dropping into them are mushrooms; it’s as if you’re a mycology student collecting samples. You drop the adorable fungal friends, each dotted with a pair of beady eyeballs, and a squeak resembling a chew toy clenched between the jaws of a playful pup is heard. It doesn’t even take more than a couple of seconds to get annoying. The core concept is exactly the same as Suika Game, combining mushrooms until you make the titular matsutake—considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine due to its partially endangered status. As you make your way up the chain of evolution, the name of each mushroom is announced by a cute Japanese voice. (Kikurage, shiitake, maitake, etc.) This also quickly gets overstimulating. The totality of the aesthetics are amusing, but they serve another important purpose: they’re disarming. It’s simply hard to be upset at a loss when lightning streaks across the screen, announcing “GAME OVER” in a fashion far too dramatic for a game about collecting mushrooms.

But it’s not just superficial differences that set Matsutake Game apart from Suika. The shapes of the mushrooms are irregular, in contrast to the perfectly round fruits. This makes their behavior less easy to predict, but more surprising. Chain reactions can come suddenly as pieces jostle around in ways you couldn’t possibly plan for. Most meaningfully, though, is the fact that Matsutake Game is the only Suika-like (that I’ve seen, anyway) that is actually in three dimensions. Pieces can fall behind your field of view or roll into positions you didn’t intend. You can use the extra volume to your advantage, too, filling as much space on the board as you can to set up future chains. It’s a brilliant remix of the formula, while still feeling familiar enough that there’s no sense of a learning curve. The z-axis of the playing field is so narrow that you can almost see everything, but wide enough that you feel the depth of the container.

Matsutake Game feels a world apart from Suika Game to me, though I can still imagine a casual observer saying it’s not different enough to justify existing. This is partially due to the fact that you can intuit so much from a physics game simply by looking at it; Suika-likes hide little from you, allowing you grasp the objective in only a couple of seconds. What you can’t glean from a cursory glance is how it feels. Suika Game is, itself, a clone of a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon. It became a phenomenon because it refined the formula it copied, perfecting previously unreliable physics and wrapping it in an aesthetic that was far more pleasant to look at. Matsutake Game feels like a similarly significant leap. If you’ve only messed around in a Suika-like for a few minutes and gotten bored, they’re probably all the same to you—but if you’re really about it, there’s a whole new world to find inside that wicker basket.