Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt

I want to like this one more than I do, and that tension is probably the most honest thing I can tell you going in. Ancient Stories: Gods of Egypt is a casual match-three from Panda Games Studio published under the Alawar Casual label, and it does exactly what that pedigree implies: colourful boards, a thin mythological wrapper, and a loop that will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time with the genre. The premise sends you after the pharaoh Tutmos, who has unleashed a plague in pursuit of immortality. You dismantle his scheme by clearing obstacle-laden boards across roughly a hundred levels, working toward the altars sustaining his spell. The story is delivered in comic-book-style storyboards and, frankly, critics were not kind to it. Characters are thin, the beats are predictable, and the art direction in those cutscenes does not carry the weight the writing asks of it. If you come to match-three for the narrative, this is not your game. What keeps things moving are the mechanical layers stacked on top of the base swapping. Matching more than three tiles creates super-powered tokens that clear whole rows or columns, and the pharaoh mask token is genuinely satisfying - combine it with any tile and every token of that colour vanishes from the board at once. On top of that, seven Egyptian gods act as activatable abilities charged by matching their preferred colour: Horus picks off individual tokens and scatters a few more at random, while Tot seeds the board with special pieces. You upgrade these abilities using currency earned through level clears, which adds a thin but real sense of progression. Boss encounters ask you to deplete an enemy health bar by targeting its colour weaknesses, and bonus puzzle stages require clearing every single token from the board. None of it reinvents anything, but the variety does prevent the loop from going completely stale. Three difficulty settings cover most players. The untimed mode removes the clock entirely for pure relaxed play, a standard mode balances moves and time, and the toughest setting layers both constraints together with a harder move cap. One critical caveat: you lock in your choice at the start and cannot change it without deleting your save. That is an odd design decision that will frustrate anyone who misjudges their own patience. There are also reported bugs where the board can freeze, locking out both movement and the pause menu until you reload - a rough edge for a released product. Visually the Egyptian theme is pleasant enough, though colour contrast on some obstacle tiles can make it genuinely hard to read the board state at a glance. The palette choices prioritise aesthetics over legibility in places, which is a small but real annoyance during later, denser stages. As a pure mood piece it sits somewhere between agreeable and anonymous. This is a game for someone who wants a low-friction session filler with a bit more mechanical texture than a basic three-in-a-row clone. It does not push the genre forward and the bugs are real, but for the right player - one who picks up a casual puzzler at the end of a long evening and does not need surprises - it will do the job for its runtime.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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