Game Review: Veggie Samurai

So as you may or may not know, most of the apps on my iPhone are games. I usually clear them out once a month or so, but the really good tend to stick around. After my old phone got stolen, though, I had a few paid apps that I didn't want to pay for again, and one of them was Veggie Samurai. It turns out that I actually didn't have to pay again, the purchase was recorded and they let me download it for free.

The basic concept of the game is pretty simple- vegetables fly across the screen, and you swipe your finger across them to cut them in halves, and to cut those halves into quarters. Occasionally you'll get a bottle of poison flying across the screen, too. You have three lives, and you lose one if you hit the poison or drop a veggie without, uh, samuraiing it. Or whatever.

Really, what I like most about this game isn't the actual gameplay (though that's pretty fun too), it's what it gets me thinking about. Why are these vegetables flying through the air in the first place? Are we making soup? If so, why is it very obviously in front of an outside garden wall, and what's with the poison? Shouldn't someone be alerted of this? Are your three lives actual people you're poisoning with your negligence? At the end of the level, you hear sort of a disappointed crowd noise- does that mean there are people watching you? Are they trying to poison the people eating the soup, or are you making the soup for them? The swipes across the screen make obvious sword noises, and the menu is a picture of a katana, so how do samurai fit into all this? Is this the sad fate of retired samurai, chopping vegetables in half for something that may or may not be a soup, or perhaps just for the sick amusement of a faceless crowd that for some reason enjoys seeing vegetables chopped into pieces for no apparent reason?

See, this is why I stick to simple games. Don't even get me started on Doodle Jump...