Puzzle Quest 3 is disappointing — here are 5 great puzzle RPGs to play instead

polygon.com:

The original Puzzle Quest, from 2007, is one of those games whose genius is all right there in the title. It has puzzles, and you go on a quest. 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. 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. It just worked.

A flood — alright, maybe a stream – of copycats followed, and then slowed to a trickle, before drying up completely. The world moved on. There remained an alchemical brilliance to Fawkner’s discovery, but the subgenre fell out of fashion, as subgenres often do. 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.

All 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. But, I’m sad to report, in the intervening 15 years, Puzzle Quest has lost its way.

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. It’s a polished game, with smoothly animated 3D characters unleashing flashy attacks on either side of the game board. But the core match-three action is unvarnished and basic, the pace