Puzzle Chronicles

My first honest reaction to Puzzle Chronicles was something close to mild bewilderment. Infinite Interactive built Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, one of the best puzzle-RPG hybrids ever made, and then turned around and shipped something that feels like it was assembled by a B-squad working under a deadline no one respected. The bones are there. The ambition is present on paper. The execution is where things unravel. The core combat mechanic is genuinely different from the match-3 formula the studio is known for, and credit where it is due: that distinction is worth noting. Instead of a shared gem grid, you and your opponent each control one half of a split battlefield, dropping Tetris-style stacks of colored gems that fall toward a central dividing wall. Destroying gem stacks charges up your rage meter, which in turn fuels weapon attacks, warbeast abilities, and battle skills. The goal is to push that wall far enough into your enemy's space that they run out of room to place new pieces. It is a tug-of-war structure with some genuine tension early on, especially once you start equipping enchanted armor and weapons that interact with how quickly your rage builds. On paper, the persistent-hero system sounds promising too: experience carries across the single-player campaign, the versus mode, quick battles, and the five unlockable mini-games, so gear and skill upgrades feel like they accumulate into something. There is even a warbeast companion you can level up alongside your barbarian. The trouble is that the real-time pacing strips away the strategic breathing room that made Puzzle Quest so compelling. Pieces fall constantly, luck in what stacks you receive matters more than positioning or planning, and once you find a rhythm that works, the game largely stops surprising you. The RPG scaffolding, including side quests, dungeon crawls for rare gear, and visits to vendors, is functional but paper-thin. There is a single playable character with no class selection, so every run through the campaign plays out identically. The story itself is a pretty direct riff on the revenge-barbarian template, complete with a mysterious sorceress companion who doles out plot information at the slowest possible rate. The voice acting has been widely and fairly criticized, the 2D character portraits look rushed, and the 3D battle animations cycle through one death pose regardless of which enemy you just defeated. Loading screens, particularly on the PC version, arrive with a frequency that breaks any momentum the puzzle combat builds. Who actually enjoys this? Casual players and younger audiences who have never touched Puzzle Quest will find an accessible, fully narrated adventure with loot to collect and a clear progression arc that runs somewhere around fifteen hours if you chase optional dungeons and gear. If you come in expecting Infinite Interactive's best work, or if you're the kind of player who needs narrative choices to matter and build variety to hold up past the midgame, you will be disappointed. The community on Steam sits at a flat 50 percent positive rating from a small sample, which is about as honest a signal as the game can give you. It is not broken, it is not offensive, it is just much less than it could have been from a studio that already proved it could do better.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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