Puzzle Qüestbler-Ross Model

The first Puzzle Quest came out my senior year of college. I purchased it on the DS and spent hours playing through it, mostly in an introductory Sociology course with mandatory attendance I didn’t want to be in. Swapping gems allowed me to pay just enough attention to the lecture to know what textbook material to read later, which was all I needed since the tests rarely included questions based on the instructor’s often historically inaccurate anecdotes. The game was enjoyable enough, an impressive feat for a game that for the most part rehashed Bejeweled, a game I had been playing for over 5 years at that point, but it was fairly buggy and after blowing through the story I put it away and moved on to another of countless awesome games we’ve been lucky to have during the DS’s lifespan.

I bought an Xbox 360 around the same time I graduated from college and moved to Connecticut. I quickly grew to appreciate the variety that could be found in the Live Arcade downloadable gaming platform and was excited when I discovered that Puzzle Quest was being ported to the 360. I downloaded it on the day it came out and spent countless hours swapping gems on my TV, listening to podcasts the whole time. It was a fantastic way to play a game while still having the attention necessary to listen to people talking about things.

Denial

When I went to PAX East in March of 2010, I saw a demo of Puzzle Quest 2, which I had known was in the works for some time but had fallen off my radar. A sci-fi spinoff “Puzzle Quest Galactrix” had come out and been largely panned and so I had avoided it. But this game appeared to be a somewhat safe return to the original game’s mechanics and presentation, an attempt to build back up some of the goodwill that had been lost with Galactrix. It stood to reason that with the name recognition and the success of the first game, this one would be more polished, more balanced, and less buggy than its predecessor.

Anger

I was wrong. Puzzle Quest 2 is still a deeply flawed game made frustrating by the fact that I can tell that down in its core lies a tiny and perfect alteration to the already amazing match-three king Bejeweled. In trying to change up the formula of the “Quest” part, Infinite Interactive has almost managed to obstruct the still-fun “Puzzle”.

another reason to be angry: my character is really goofy looking

Bargaining

The original game took a fairly high-level approach to its RPG trappings. You traveled over an expansive world map from town to town, making trips back to certain areas to buy gear or manage various skill-enhancing accessories like mounts.As you traveled you met plot-advancing NPCs and enemies with whom you would initiate a head-to-head turn-based Bejeweled match. Matching a color meant adding an amount of that color to “mana” reserves, and turns could be spent spending that mana on class-specific spells that were learned over the course of the game rather than matching gems. A distinct set of objects on the board, skulls, caused direct damage to your opponent rather than adding to your mana supply. You’d collect some gold and experience and then move on to your next challenge.

The sequel to Puzzle Quest works on a smaller scale, emulating dungeon crawlers like Diablo. You start in a small town populated by a small handful of quest givers and a set of vendors and traverse downward into themed floors, spurred on by one ongoing quest chain and several optional side quests. You collect all sorts of loot throughout the game, and you can use raw materials to enhance items when taken to a craftsman in town. The whole map is tied together by a series of portals that you uncover as you complete various plot points, but otherwise you navigate through the map tiles in a similar, but zoomed in, manner to how the original game was navigated. One nice touch is that your cursor is automatically focused on the path that will lead you towards the goal for your current active quest, so if you are totally disinterested in the side quests and just want to zoom through the main game, you can basically just keep hitting A until you’re presented with a battle to fight.

Depression

The interface isn’t so handy at other times, though. The whole game is filled with tiny, unhelpful icons so you pretty much constantly have to press a button to bring up tooltips to tell you what things are and what they mean. The tooltip obscures important parts of the interface, though, so I found myself toggling the tooltips on and off constantly. The portal system is filled with sizable lists of portals for each floor with no clue as to where in the floor that portal is other than a screenshot of what that room looks like. This may sound helpful, but the rooms in each floor are largely the same and so you’re left to wonder whether the room you want to go to in the southeast corner is “The Killing Fields” or “The Goblin Cauldron” or “The Butcher Shop” (I made those rooms up, but you get the idea— it’s all generic fantasy stuff like that.) For a dungeon crawler, the loot is supremely boring— it may just be because I played barbarian, but I got one sword somewhere around the end of the second floor of the dungeon and used it for most of the game; I don’t remember how long I used the armor I found and how terribly poor the rest of the armor I found was. Why have all this loot if I’m going to sell ALL of it? Even if it’s to get money, there was very little to spend the gold on— the loot in the shops was even worse than the crap I found underground, and while I could use gold to upgrade weapons it also requires raw materials like leather and various minerals and it was these materials that were almost always the limiting factor despite the fact that I accessed and looted basically every treasure chest I found.

what the hell? which one of these is which?

Even the quest interface is annoying; when you complete a quest it slowly tells you over the course of 5 or 6 barely visible lines of white text across the middle of the screen how much gold and experience you’ve gained, that you’ve completed a quest, and (if applicable) that a new follow-up quest has been added to your quest log. There’s no way to speed this process up or dismiss it altogether, so you’re stuck hammering the A button wondering when your character will start moving again.

Acceptance

But what of the puzzle game itself? It’s largely untouched from the original version, although the computer AI does seem to get significantly fewer infinite combos with a suspicious knowledge of what gems exist above the visible board, and a new type of gem has been added: a gauntlet that builds up a special counter that can be spent to use your weapon as a direct attack. Finding and matching sets of fours and fives, getting combos, building up just enough mana to use a spell and finish off your enemy right at the last “second” is all still exciting and fun (and achievements for winning while at one health point and losing with the enemy down to one health point help recognize how exciting these moments can be). Small twists on the puzzle mechanic to simulate disarming traps, searching rooms, picking locks, and bashing down doors is interesting (although not as successful as Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes’ twists on its standard formula for certain key battles).

I’m still planning on finishing this game, even if it’s not what I wanted it to be. I can play it while listening to podcasts, and I have a huge queue of those. My problem stems from the fact that it basically exists as a time killer and a middling implementation of Bejeweled when it could be something so much more.

—Casey