Pearl Puzzle

Pearl Puzzle was one of those games you'd find tucked away on a Flash portal in the late 2000s. It didn't have a big name attached to it, but it had a clean, simple look that felt typical for the time. You loaded it in a browser window, and it just worked, no fuss. It was the kind of thing you'd play for a few minutes between other tasks, a quiet little logic exercise.

You control a cursor, clicking on groups of two or more pearls of the same color to remove them. The main goal is to stop the board from completely filling with white pearls, which rise slowly from the bottom. Each click makes the pearls above the cleared space drop down, sometimes creating new matches in the process. The game gives you bonuses for making larger chains or clearing many pearls at once, which helps manage the relentless upward creep. The pace is steady, and the difficulty comes from the board gradually constricting, leaving you fewer options. It feels like a patient, methodical race against a rising tide.