But the core match-three action is unvarnished and basic, the pace of its interaction with the combat systems (you match gems to charge up spells of the same color) feels sluggish, the story is bland, and the many layers of RPG tinkering outside of combat weigh it all down. It’s a polished game, with smoothly animated 3D characters unleashing flashy attacks on either side of the game board. Puzzle Quest 3, which is available on Steam, iOS, and Android, can’t find the magic in that same simple connection of gems and stats anymore. But, I’m sad to report, in the intervening 15 years, Puzzle Quest has lost its way. Puzzle Quest arrived just too early to make hay on smartphones, where GungHo’s similarly themed, free-to-play Puzzle & Dragons cleaned up a few years later - but even that game is no longer available on the iOS App Store.Īll of which made the recent release of Puzzle Quest 3 a curiosity - not to mention a beacon of hope for people, like me, who like matching colors and watching numbers get bigger. There remained an alchemical brilliance to Fawkner’s discovery, but the subgenre fell out of fashion, as subgenres often do. It just worked.Ī flood - alright, maybe a stream – of copycats followed, and then slowed to a trickle, before drying up completely. This genre mash-up from Australian studio Infinite Interactive, designed by Steve Fawkner, was all the more inspired for its incongruous, salted-caramel clash of two flavors: gaming at its most casual, abstract, and bite-sized, melded with a long-form storytelling genre known for depth and intricacy. Its creators had a simple idea and executed it well: use a Bejeweled-style match-three puzzle game as the gameplay engine for a role-playing adventure, in which you combat enemies, level up, and follow a story.
The original Puzzle Quest, from 2007, is one of those games whose genius is all right there in the title.