Merge Me!

Introduction

Merge Me! borrows its structure wholesale from the free-to-play mobile merge genre — drag two identical creatures together to combine them into something stronger, sell the results for gold, spend that gold on upgrades, and work toward roughly a hundred total fusions spread across eight themed sections. What separates it from its mobile inspirations is the business model: one small upfront price, no advertisements, no timers, no microtransactions. Released 10 February 2023 by developer PELMENI GAMES, it currently sits at a lifetime Mostly Negative on Steam, with 11 positive reviews against 19 negative across a sample of 30 — a small corpus, but one with an unusually consistent story running through both sides of the ledger.

A likeable idea, and a slow opening

Where this review's positive sample agrees is on the basic appeal of watching a roster of monsters grow stranger and more elaborate as you merge your way up each section's ladder. One detailed positive review compares the satisfaction directly to a collection hobby — "unlocking each new fusion... satisfies my desire for discovering and collecting shiny things" — and rates the price as reasonable for roughly two days of active play spent seeing every combination the game has to offer. That same review, though, immediately qualifies the praise: the opening stretch is "painfully slow," with stretches spent doing little more than clicking the same tile for the better part of an hour before new content starts appearing at a reasonable pace. A separate negative review makes the identical complaint in harsher terms, describing "beginning progress" as "torturous" and comparing it to sitting and clicking one spot for an hour with no real feedback loop yet in place.

The same bug, reported for three straight years

The most damaging pattern in this review's sample isn't a matter of taste — it's a specific, repeated technical complaint. Two of the most-upvoted negative reviews, both posted the same launch week in February 2023, independently describe relic and prestige achievements failing to register even after the in-game requirements are met: one reviewer reports being "stuck doing the game on level 1" and unable to prestige past it at all, while another separately lists "Relic Achievements don't register (i have all relics but not the achievement for it)" among a list of launch-week bugs. That would be an ordinary early-access rough patch on its own, except a further review — dated 30 May 2026, more than three years after release — opens with the same complaint verbatim: "relic achievements are broken." Steam's own global achievement data is consistent with the reports rather than contradicting them: where the first tier of most achievement categories in this game sits comfortably above 60-75% of the tracked player base, the equivalent first relic achievement lags well behind at under 20%, a gap wide enough to suggest the reviewers are describing a real, structural problem rather than a personal misunderstanding of the mechanic.

A grind wall three reviewers measured independently

The second consistent thread concerns the game's very end. Three different reviewers, writing at different times with no apparent connection to one another, each attempt to estimate how long it would take to reach the final "complete the game" milestone once every other upgrade has been purchased. Their numbers disagree wildly — one puts it at roughly seventy days of the game simply running, a second at "over 100 days," a third, more colourfully, at "about 7 years" — but the underlying shape of the complaint is identical across all three: a currency sink at the very end of the game that scales far beyond anything the rest of the experience prepares you for, with the game providing no offline progress at all to soften the wait. Steam's global data backs this up plainly: the outright completion achievement sits at just 7.8% of the tracked player base, the lowest figure attached to any milestone in the game. That's directly at odds with the store page's own marketing copy, which specifically promises "no boring exponential difficulty growth" and "fair rewards and fair prices" — a claim this review's evidence does not support for anyone hoping to see the credits roll.

A short verdict from the middle of the pack

Not every review in the sample falls into the two big patterns above. A terser Polish-language review, upvoted eight times — more than all but two negative reviews in the whole sample — simply reads "Nie jest złe. Tylko nudne": not bad, just boring. It's a useful middle-ground data point between the enthusiastic collectors and the reviewers cataloguing broken achievements, and it lines up with a general theme in the neutral-to-negative reviews: nothing here is actively offensive to play, it just runs out of momentum well before its own final goal comes into view. One further launch-week review adds a smaller, more mundane complaint worth folding in alongside the relic-achievement bug: dragged creatures occasionally overlapping or vanishing from the single inventory screen when dropped at the wrong moment, a rough-edges UI issue rather than a progression blocker, but one more small crack in a launch that clearly needed more time in the oven.

Final Verdict

There's a genuinely likeable game struggling to get out of Merge Me! — the core act of combining creatures into stranger forms works well enough that more than one reviewer compares it favourably to a real collecting hobby, and the clean, ad-free, one-time price is exactly the kind of monetisation this library likes to see more of in the genre. What holds the score down is not a matter of taste but of specific, corroborated technical failure: an achievement bug reported at launch and still being reported more than three years later, and an endgame grind that three independent reviewers, comparing notes with nobody, all clocked as somewhere between absurd and nearly impossible. Buy it cheap for the first few hours of monster-merging if the concept appeals; don't expect to finish it, and don't expect every achievement you earn along the way to actually register.