Mythmatch Review – Match 3 Game Made in Heaven | games

TThis has been a trend for a while where familiar puzzle game genres are infused with new stories to give them depth and meaning beyond just scanning the screen for points. Mysterious creature sorting game Strange Horticulture and historical romance card game Regency Solitaire are great examples, and now here’s Mythmatch, a match-three game in the style of Candy Crush or Bejeweled that’s also a warm story of friendship and community set in a small town in ancient Greece. The puzzles are interspersed with scenes of dialogue between villagers and gods that highlight each other and give small clues that are later picked up, making it both a puzzle game and a community oral history.

You play as Artemis, the immortal daughter of Zeus, who’s tired of being overlooked at plum jobs in favor of her gruff brother Apollo (brilliantly portrayed as an insufferable proto-tech brother). When the God of the Hunt’s turn comes, she applies, but finds that she must first gain the approval of her council of elders on Mount Olympus, all of whom have puzzle-based jobs for her. Hephaestus wants her to help make arrows and hammers in his forge, while Apollo needs her to protect his collection of chimpanzee soft toys (a not-so-subtle dig at NFTs). These mini-quests take the form of match-3 puzzles, though they cleverly bring in elements from other puzzle games like Plants vs Zombies and Overcooked.

But before she can get the role, Artemis is banished from Olympus and sent to the human city of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, who has taken all the men and disappeared for years, leaving the women and children to fend for themselves. Here, the game becomes a mini-simulator of rural life, where you help the locals by constructing new buildings for them, helping them trade with other settlements and solving their complicated lives. It’s great that this is mostly done by matching three things. Each item you find in the world can be placed with two other identical items to make something new: match three shells and you’ll get a pearl, match three twigs and you’ll get a wooden plank. Every item you create in this way can also be matched again, so you end up with an evolving hierarchy of items that can be used to build new things and help villagers when they come to you with their needs and problems.

This becomes the cycle of the game: You spend your days on Earth becoming a more useful god, and then at night, you can return to Olympus to try to improve your score on challenges set by the gods. When you become indispensable in the lives of humans, they reward you with Faith – Church Experience Points, which you can spend to make Olympian Puzzle quests easier. Brilliantly designed, this structure encapsulates both the pleasantly busy action of a farm simulation and the compelling mental challenge of a match-three puzzle game.

The visual style is cute and cartoonish without being too cutesy, the characters you meet are well-drawn and sympathetic, and its stories combine ancient Greek mythology with relevant everyday issues and timeless social and political themes. There’s unrequited love, there’s social anxiety, but there are also underlying themes that deal with everything from absent fathers, to corporate greed, to the philosophy of leadership and the reciprocal nature of worship.

Mythmatch is pretty funny too. Combining three beetles creates a raccoon, which will then go through the villagers’ waste bags and produce plastic that you can match with different toys and other useful items. When they have finished collecting these wonderful creatures, they fall asleep, and you often pass them as you walk about the city, lying puffy, well-fed, and surrounded by rubbish.

I started playing one afternoon and didn’t stop for nine hours. The interwoven systems, the engaging pace, and the ebb and flow between Olympus and the human world are almost hypnotic. Every time you reach the end of the day’s cycle, you think, “Just one more day,” and then it’s 2 a.m. and you’re still trying to grow a pumpkin for the next Demeter Festival, or set a trap for a monster in the woods. Expertly and lovingly crafted, Mythmatch is an ode to beautiful and useful game design.