If you like popping pimples and blackheads in the mirror and seeing poorly rendered cartoonish imitations of that experience, one that you already must stomach in actual life, then Pimple Popper Lite by Room Candy Games (free in the App store) is the — wait, I forgot that no one enjoys that. Apparently the folks over at Room Candy Games thought this was a good idea. Please allow me to share my experience so that you don’t have to go through the trouble of downloading, being disgusted, then deleting this thoroughly pointless app. Pimple Popper Lite begins by wasting our time with a lengthy loading screen. After it stops, you find yourself on the start page. It is all very cartoonish throughout the whole app, and the simple presentation layer makes you wonder what took the app so long to wake up. Either way, on to the mechanics. Tap Touch to Start to begin.
Basically the point of the game is to examine a lovely (simple) cartoon rendering of a person’s face. There are tiny points on the face that denote zits. There is a counter at the top of the screen to inform you of how many you have done out of how many there are on the face. In the same bar at the top of the screen, you will also see what level you are currently playing. In the bottom right corner, there is a question mark that will teach you how to handle each type of zit. Now it gets really fun.
Tap the face near one of the zits, and it will zoom into that area. Now, there will be more definition of the blemish. Tap again, and it will zoom in further — right up on that thing. It will be one of three types of zits: the blackhead, the whitehead and the full-blown pimple. They all require the same mechanic to extract the pus from the zit. The only difference in the mechanics is when dealing with a blackhead. Simply swipe across the blackhead, mimicking a scratching gesture, then proceed with the gesture of squeezing the zit.
To extract the pus, you must press slowly from the sides toward the center of the blemish, much like in real life. You must do this three times while being accompanied by over-simple and quite disgusting sound effects that persist each time you successfully extract some of the pus or pinch too hard and hurt the ‘toon. After successfully extracting all the pus, (three successful squeezes) tap Zoom Out to see the whole face again.
There it is. Pimple Popper Lite. There isn’t any more. I didn’t enjoy playing it. I didn’t enjoy looking at it. There isn’t much to be said about this mistake of an app. The game mechanic repeats itself, and changing the toon’s hair color is not variety. If that’s not enough, you can pay 99 cents for a version without ads.
