Puzzle Galaxies

I went in with genuinely low expectations, and Puzzle Galaxies mostly met them - which, oddly, is not the insult it sounds like. This is Evermore Game Studios' debut title, a bare-bones match-3 puzzler set across 68 levels aboard a space station, and its modest ambitions are worn openly on its sleeve. The core loop is classic gem-swapping: clear the jewels from each pod before the timer expires. The wrinkle is the five distinct enemy ship types that orbit your board and pluck matching jewels away before you can make your move. That single mechanic is the entire reason to try this over just loading up Bejeweled, and it works well enough to create a few genuinely tense moments, especially in later levels where locked safes must be cracked before you can complete a stage. The production level is modest to a fault. Resolution handling is rough - the Steam community has flagged mismatched resolution defaults that push the image off-screen on certain setups, and there are reports of audio dropping out entirely. The developer has posted a pinned tips thread addressing windowed mode workarounds, which suggests these issues are known but not fully patched. None of it is catastrophic, but for a game with no atmospheric soundtrack to speak of, losing the audio entirely does strip away one of the few sensory layers keeping the experience alive. Where Puzzle Galaxies earns a small amount of goodwill is in the unlimited time mode. Strip away the clock and the enemy pressure, and what remains is a gentle, low-friction puzzler that asks nothing of you. It is the kind of thing you leave running on a second monitor on a slow afternoon. The move-efficiency scoring system adds a light layer of personal challenge for anyone who wants to revisit completed stages and tighten their lines. None of this elevates the game into something you would carve out dedicated sessions for, but it does mean the experience is coherent rather than broken. Steam reception sits right at the midpoint - roughly half of the small pool of reviewers recommend it - and that split feels accurate. The players who are positive tend to be honest about what they signed up for: a sub-dollar distraction. The players who are negative wanted more polish, more content, more reason to keep going past the midpoint. Both camps are right. Puzzle Galaxies is Evermore's first game, and it reads like one. The enemy-ship mechanic is a genuinely interesting seed for a bigger idea that never grew. If you are a match-3 completionist hunting something off the beaten path, or just need a technically simple idle puzzler with a mild sci-fi skin, it will fill about two to three hours without demanding much. Anyone else can skip it without missing something irreplaceable.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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