I've had my eye on Monsters & Memories since it was announced. In fact, I joined their Discord server right away when I heard about it, and then after a month or so, I realized I couldn't keep up with chat and promptly left. This was way back in, what, 2020? 2021?
Anyway, yesterday I caught wind from Shawn Lord's LinkedIn that this weekend they were holding a couple rounds of stress testing, and I decided to download it and give it a shot. (I used to work with Shawn back at KingsIsle.)
Of course there were all kinds of padded warnings that came along with their stress test:
"PLEASE NOTE: By registering for, downloading, or logging into Monsters & Memories, you acknowledge your understanding that this is a technical "stress test" of an early development build and not a pre-alpha, alpha, beta, or any other form of test indicative of the game being in a ready-for-release state."
There was even more padding after you installed about the state of the game being buggy and not ready for prime time, BUT there was no NDA or any kind of gag order. In fact, there were people Twitch streaming their gameplay last night.
Oogaooga the Ogre Beastmaster
The game in its current state feels very much like a love letter to Everquest and classic MMOs, and it was every bit as confusing as that first time you logged into Everquest and had to kind of figure out what it was you were doing. At the same time "/attack" worked just fine . . . so it felt instantly familiar.
Of course I got my butt handed to me by a beetle the first time I tried slash attack
The real fun of the game didn't seem to be attacking things right at first anyway. The city behind the gates you spawn at was sprawling and impressive in its size and maze-like qualities. Just like in Everquest, this was a city you could get lost in.
Looking out upon half of the city late at night from up on a ledge
Eventually the server I was on crashed out, and I had to hop on a second server and try again. While I was there, I finally figured out how to scribe my spells into my spellbook, but I couldn't quite figure out how to then transfer my spellbook spells over to my ability slots to cast them. I wandered the city a bit with my new Gnome Beastmaster and then logged out for the night.
Somewhere in here, there's a quest giver waiting for me to put a note in his inventory box
I'm glad I was able to add my bandwidth to the stress test. There's another stress test for a few hours this afternoon as well, so I may jump on again. Either way, it was interesting to see so many people there pining for the old days in Everquest to be new again. Can't wait to see where Monsters and Memories is a couple years from now.
Ahhh, so you're up to your old tricks, eh? But are you up to your old, Jentrix though!? No? Don't even know what the heck I'm talking about!? Well, I can't blame you!
I'm here writing what is possibly my last review (at least for now) in a series of Match-3 VR game reviews. Yeah, there's one or two more games I could write about that technically fall in the Match-3 genre, and who knows what's yet to come in this crazy subgenre . . . but I've reached the end of my original list of Match-3 VR games I wanted to check out.
And how do I end this series of reviews? With a crazy game that's a mad mixup of Jenga and Match-3 in a VR game that has some good ol' goofy physics fun! It's Jentrix! Check it out:
Jentrix is an $8 game on Steam with a "coming soon" store front message on Oculus. Unfortunately at the time of writing, it doesn't appear this game is included with Steam's Puzzlefest going on right now. I'd say the price is still right on the money for the experience. Even better, apparently they just added multiplayer to the game? I've yet to try it out! I bet you it's a lot of fun.
Time to get your Berries, Bananas, and Peas in a row
So in Jentrix you slide elongated fruits out from a Jenga-like stack of elongated fruits and try to match up three of a kind. You gotta be careful though since the slightest upward or downward pull can send your whole stack of fruits tumbling. To make matters more frantic, you have pieces that are actually mini-crocodiles, birds that somehow freeze your pieces in blocks of ice (don't ask me, I can't explain it), and a timer that spits out pieces to the top of the stack every few seconds. If your fruits fall on the floor, you have a limited time to pick it up. Let too many fruits fall on the floor and it's game over.
Still lots of progress to make on the Jentrix campaign map!
The game has 20 achievements, and a good majority of them have to do with progression along the campaign map or with achieving high scores in arcade mode. So far in campaign mode, it seems like it's all about reaching point goals. When you achieve a certain score for the level, you win and progress to the next node of the map. It feels like I'm about 1/4th of the way in currently and I'm not sure what new mechanics they'll throw at me as I progress or if it will be just turning up of the five difficulty knobs they seem to have:
1- pieces fall in a faster cadence
2- new and different pieces
3- more and faster freezing birds
4- increased point goal markers
5- fewer allowed mistakes
I'm kind of excited to see what else they've got!
Giving a frozen strawberry smackdown to a red bird
This game isn't really meant to be played sitting down. You've gotta stand up to get all these angles. You'll also be doing a lot of toe touches as you bend down to pick up fallen pieces. So for a puzzle game, there's actually a lot of physical movement you need to do to play Jentrix.
I think my favorite part of this game isn't necessarily its gameplay, but rather its colorful skin and humorous physics fun. It's fun to grab these fruits and slot them in to the puzzle. It's also pretty funny when you just spill the whole tower and wait to start over. That said, they've somehow allowed for a certain amount of leniency with the game's physics and made a pretty great system in what seems an impossible scenario of stacking.
Back over to the Quest 2 today, and I think I've discovered a pretty cool VR Match-3 game that might just be my favorite of the bunch yet!
Rainbow Reactor Fusion comes in at a little bit of a higher price point at $15, but I'm finding it absolutely worth it. At first I thought this game was only available through the Sidequest, but their Sidequest link led right to the Oculus store. Unfortunately this game isn't yet available on Steam, but it says it's coming soon. Check it out!
At its heart, Rainbow Reactor Fusion is basically a VR version of a carnival ball toss game. Balls of paint roll down at you from ramps that are to the right and left of you, and you have to grab them and toss them on to the game field. When you toss a ball in a spot where it touches 3 or more colors, all those colors are removed and you score points. Throw a ball out of bounds, and you'll earn a strike. Three strikes and it's game over.
To make the game more interesting, they've also made it where you can fuse colored balls together to create one ball of a different color. The fusion doesn't really work in true color wheel fashion, but once you start fusing colors, you start to get the hang of it.
Red and Green make Yellow, Yellow and Teal make Green, Green and Blue make Teal, etc.
Now, if this game was just what was stated above, it probably wouldn't be worth $15. What makes this game worth more is the factory-wide restoration/puzzle-solving story game you undertake while playing the above game . . . and its charm. Yup, this game is also oozing with fun Portal 2-esque character charm while solving the factory's mystery.
At the start of the game you find yourself standing in an elevator, watching a black and white video of one Alfred Luzan von Hoffenhasselbrock as he breaks down the history of the Rainbow Reactor Factory and how it all works. Once the tutorial video is over, you're introduced to a little robot buddy named Dottie. Dottie guides you in restoration efforts from this point forward.
Dottie welcoming me back to the Rainbow Reactor Factory
Over time you'll purchase an axe, a wrench, a brush, and other tools from an in-game shop. These all help unravel the mystery of the factory. All the while you'll be playing the Rainbow Reactor Fusion Match-3 game as part of it all.
I haven't yet made it to the end of the game, but it is getting more challenging the further up the factory I go. Multiple colors on the board make the game interesting and the speed at which the color fusion paint balls start coming toward you also raise the challenge.
The game itself makes really good use of VR as a medium for the match-3 game and it is a very physical experience. The UIs bend around transparent screens and look like they are a part of the world.
Notice how the game UI makes sense in the world and doesn't look slapped on the screen?
Overall, this is just a really well put together game. I'm happy to have discovered it in my hunt of VR Match-3 games.
For anyone that owns a Quest 2 headset (affordable VR woot), I'm not sure how many know they can unlock the immense library of Sidequest games that you can play from little known developers. Just think of Sidequest as the Roblox of VR development.
To actually make your way on to the Oculus Store as a legit game, you have to undergo a certification QA process that seems to stop many in their tracks. That's where Sidequest comes in. People can load their un-QA'd games up to a third-party download site like itch.io, make a trailer, set a price, and BAM . . . you're a VR developer.
On the other end, as a player you have to configure your Quest 2 in a certain way to play these games, but it's not rocket science, just follow the tutorial.
The reason why this review has all this padding is because I'm starting to exhaust the library of VR Match-3 games that are out there and today's game comes from Sidequest.
Button bombers! It's a VR Match-3 Demo from a fella named Andrew Stout. He's actually put quite a bit of work into this demo and it plays really well. Check it out:
The style of match 3 found in Button Bombers is the upward elevating style. The game that instantly comes to mind for me was Wizard101's Wizardblox since I played so much of that game. (Wizardblox wasn't the only match 3 that used this technique -- just the first that came to mind). Basically, you start with a board that is 2/3rds full and new matching pieces come from the bottom of the board as they slowly rise upward. If an object on the gameboard hits the top, then it's game over.
Besides the basics, what Button Bombers has going for it is creative flair. On the "Button" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of sewing puns and head nods. Your match pieces are buttons, your training grounds are a "sewing dojo" (although I think he should have just gone with "Sewjo") that's decorated with needles and scissors.
Even the volume controls are on zippers in the options menu
The game pieces have sewing themed mechanics to them. Your buttons can get "pinned," and you have to make matches with them to unpin them. Your buttons can be stitched together, and you have to make a match underneath them to break the stitching. Your buttons can instead be "snaps" that act as bombs. It's a sewing themed match 3.
there's a lot of mechanics going on here . . .
ON the "Bombers" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of warfare puns and head nods. Your match 3 games are 1v1 battles against AI. When you or the AI make large matches, you throw bombs, bricks, and torpedoes on to the other player's game board. You travel a war map defeating opponent after opponent. Your opponents are on a sewn together ship that you're trying to sink with cannon fire from your ship.
On a ship, looking at a battle map, ready to bomb some buttons!
So not only are you creatively meshing VR and match-3, but you're also meshing sewing with warfare. It's a combination that makes absolutely no sense, but somehow works at the same time.
In addition there's a strange dialog system mechanic that probably has some future meaning to it where you can earn +1 scores to traits that don't currently do anything. Add a +1 to my confusion! Where was he going with this system? Will we ever know?!
At the end of the day here. Yeah. I don't really want to offer criticism of this project. It's a free demo. It's a single dev. It's something where you can tell a lot of heart and thought was put into the project -- probably a lot more than some of the other VR Match-3 games I've been playing.
I hope he finishes it because I had fun playing it. If he ever happens to read this post, here's me wishing you the best of luck! Thanks for adding to the VR Match-3 genre.
Not going to lie, I'm kind of excited to show off today's matching game. The past few days I've been doing a few reviews on match-3 VR games, and in my search for games I stumbled upon "Match It!", which is a colors and numbers matching game. The best part of Match It! is that it's absolutely free, so there's absolutely no buyers remorse at all.
Now, just to be fair to the Match-3 VR genre, this isn't a match-3, but it is a match 2. I had "match 3" so firmly embedded in my mind that as I started to play this game I was grabbing hexes and trying to drop them on top of other hexes. It didn't work. You need to use both hands to play . . . like so:
There's zero instructions on this game, but after experimenting a bit, I quickly came to find out that you can do this one of two ways, either by simultaneously clicking on matching hexes or by grabbing one hex and holding it with one hand and clicking on the matching hex with another hand . . . the latter being more effective with larger boards, but the former being more of a mental workout and faster on smaller boards.
What's genius about this game is the tension they're able to bring into it by making the leaderboards an active part in gameplay.
As you begin clicking and playing, you're elevated up between a cube of skyscrapers. You have this feeling of being ON TOP of the world as you start clicking and begin your game. Then you begin your descent as you slowly drop a step each time a faster past leaderboard entry is reached. For some reason, feeling your descent in VR while simultaneously hearing a descension note as you drop a place on the leaderboard is absolutely genius. It gives this really nice competitive tension to the game and makes it an experience I hadn't yet felt in VR.
I need more copycat games that use this tension, please!
There's actually a leaderboard for each variation of match it game. These leaderboards certainly don't feel faked if they are. If you happen to download it and see "It Stings" with a time of 8.64 seconds or better on the default numbers, 4-color, 32 blocks game . . . let me know!
Top Ten! I CAN DO BETTER!
I found the REAL fun of this game was the numbers, 8-color, 128 blocks game. Awesome and such a workout as you spin around trying to find a random number between 1 and 64.
So there's not much to this game and it's very simple. It's all it needs to be, and it's 100 percent free. No complaints from me. If you're looking for a great intro to VR matching game experience, Match It! appears to be a great starter game.
Yup, it’s that time! Time to match
another group of colored things together in a VR Match 3 game. Who doesn’t love
matching things together? Who cares if they’re cubes, not gems?! Quest for
Runia doesn’t care!
Quest for Runia is actually a pretty good
bargain for the size of game it is at $5 on Steam. It has an astounding 27
achievements, at least 7 environments (maybe more?!), and some zen-like play
that’s only moderately difficult at times.
Ok, here’s the whole shtick with Quest
for Runia. Basically, you have a big staff in one hand. You use this staff to
shoot out a colored cube that snaps to other colored cubes in a color cube
puzzle. If you match at least 3 colors together, then all the matching colors
that are touching sides will be stripped away. The object, remove ALL the
colored cubes on the playing field. If you are super efficient, you’ll 3 star
that puzzle. If you’re mildly efficient, you’ll 2 star it. If you are just
kinda clicking things, you’ll either 1 star or fail the level. Fail the level,
and you have to try again.
A beginner intro puzzle in Quest for Runia
While this is 3D space in VR, the puzzle
stays in front of your field of view for the most part, and you don’t need to
move around much at all. Save for the boss levels, where the big bad of the
story, Karos the magician, puts you in a color cube prison, and you have to make
matches to get out.
Don't let the evil Karos fool you, He is way more diabolical than Orco from He-man!
Environments are set up as kind of
floating islands, and as you beat one puzzle, you progress to a different
location on the island until you beat all the puzzles in the environment. As any
level designer for match 3 games can tell you, one of the best moments in
crafting a level is when you get to shape it like something. The most
common being “the heart” shape, for example. You can tell the level designer in
Quest for Runia had a lot of fun making these tear-away matching puzzles.
Sometimes the puzzle would look like a cauldron or a ship or what-have-you. Kind of cool! Most of the time it
was just a mess of colors in big cube shapes with plenty of holes in the
middle.
Check it out!
Now it’s time for all my
complaints. I’m sorry! Yeesh, me and my complaints! Only a couple here:
The big complaint – there is nothing more
frustrating than when you want to place a cube somewhere in this game, and the
slightest movement of your hand while you click your trigger button to place
it, somehow makes a cube end up somewhere else besides where you intended
it.
It’s hard to explain it, but here’s the scenario: say you wanted to put a
blue cube on the top of another blue cube to connect two rows of blue cubes
together, thus removing both rows of blue cubes with one click. BUT, if you
ever so slightly move your hand down a touch when you’re clicking to place your
cube, then BAM . . . aww crap, I placed the blue cube on the FRONT of a cube
instead of the TOP and then only end up removing one of the two rows. (You can actually see something like that happen at the 1:41 mark in the video above)
For a zen-like game, having any moments
of frustration is a big turn off. I’ve been kind of wracking my brain thinking,
hmmm, if this was my game how would I do that differently. I think it
comes down to the controls they give you. The only method for alleviating
this is to “spin” the 3D structure of cubes around by pressing a button and hoping for a good angle as the puzzle shifts in 90 degree increments. In a perfect world, I’d change
this so that I could grow or shrink a puzzle through pinch and pull movements
and allow the player to drag themselves around the puzzle instead of always having it stuck
in front of me. If I could get INTO the puzzle’s nooks and crannies, I’d be a match-happy friendly necromancer. I suppose that could be considered just part of the challenge, but . . . really? I don't think so.
Next big complaint – VR is a tricky
medium to work in when it comes to UI. A player’s immersion gets really killed
by floating UI elements. It’s like, you have this low-poly charming world
around you in Quest for Runia, but it’s kind of ruined by this slapped on UI
that floats at the bottom of the puzzle area. It’s a real challenge to
incorporate UI into the environment so it feels more natural. I don’t know how
I would have done it differently, but just know there’s kind of a UX no-no
going on here. Not to mention the UI icons look like temp art, but then again,
the game is $5, so you get what you pay for, right?
Anyway, those things aside, this isn’t a
bad game. You progress through worlds filled with puzzles getting some light
story with a little zen-like match 3 that has an occasional point of
frustration because of controls. Ok. It’s better than a lot of these other
Match 3 VR games I’ve played, so there you go!
You know, when you strap on a VR headset
for the first time, you’re going to want to play one of the classics: Beatsaber, Space Pirate Trainer, Astrobot, Gorilla Tag, Lucky’s Tale, Half-Life
Alyx (which I still need to play btw . . . it’s in my backlog), etc. The last
thing you think of playing is a match 3 game in VR, but here we are . . .
reading all about them on The Friendly Necromancer blog of all places. Yup.
And I have to say . . . you know that
feeling when you’re playing a game and you feel like . . . so this is what
we’ve come to. Well thankfully, Fatal Gem won’t be the last game I ever
play. We’re just gonna put that $3 price tag down to a fun experiment.
You know, like buying a six-pack of RC Cola because you forgot what it tasted
like.
Nice run-on sentence, Fatal Gem!
That’s right! Fatal Gem is a VR Match 3
game on Steam for the low price of $3 and a little bit of your dignity. Right
off the bat when you find yourself in darkness trying to grab a pickaxe reading
some hacked together English, you know things are gonna be a bit dicey.
Fatal Gem is traditional match 3, but
since it’s in VR, the playing field wraps all the way around you, and I gotta
give it up to this game for that mere fact. If you’ve ever wondered what
it would feel like to be completely surrounded by match 3 gems, this is your
game. You get 3 levels of timed-point-gathering play, and that’s it. The
crazy thing is, either way, you’re going to blow up. Victory or Defeat .
. . it’s all the same in Fatal Gem, the only thing that really matters is your
score at the very end of the game.
Surrounded in Gems!
Do I have complaints about this game,
yeah, I mean besides the obvious lack of content and re-playability, um, of course I do.
My main complaint is this: I don’t like that the game makes me wait
to make matches until the cascades of gems have finished, especially when the
game is pitting you against a timer. This is especially bad in a 3D space
because while the game is cascading in front of you, you should be able to be
making matches behind you or to the sides of you. It’s a match 3 philosophy
that every match 3 developer has to make. Do I lock the board during
cascading, or do I come up with a tech solution to allow players to make
matches during cascading? It’s not a bad thing that boards are locked, if it
makes sense for the game you’re building. For instance, I absolutely loved the
match 3 gameplay in Gems of War. Gems of War, locked the board during
cascading, and that was fine for that game. On Animal Cove, we didn’t
lock the board, and it made timed levels play a whole heck of a lot better.
Fatal Gem is a timed level experience . . . you see what I’m throwing down here?
Next complaint, the controls are a little
weird. Sometimes gems would just shift on their own if I was clicking the
trigger button too much during a gem cascade. I had to slow down and wait for
the gems to settle before trying to make a match, otherwise gems would just
seem to shift on their own after the cascade.
There was really only one power up, an
AOE explosion gem, and I have to say it was super disappointing that there
wasn’t a horizontal line clear ability. It would have been so cool in a board
that wraps all the way around you to have a line clear shift all the gems.
My final complaint is just polish notes.
If I win the game, let me be dragged up into the UFO as a victory sequence. Don’t
blow me up. If I do blow up, just polish what that looks like so it
doesn’t feel so unfinished. That’s all. Just put a little extra
love into your craft and art. It would be appreciated.
I won your game! Take me with you!
So, while Fatal Gem may not be the best
VR Match 3 experience out there, I have to hand it to them for surrounding me
in gems. It’s a fun use of Virtual space. Outside of that, man, polish the game
a bit and you could have some potential. As it is now, this feels like
buying a six-pack of RC Cola and remembering why you didn’t like it.
