The Stack

And while we’re on well-regarded indie puzzle games, I might as well pull this one out. 2D Boy’s World of Goo has gotten enough good press that I didn’t hesitate to purchase it off Steam a few weeks ago when it was on sale, but didn’t have the time to start it. That’s happening a lot lately. Every weekend, Steam puts a large and temporary discount on one or more games, and it’s going to be the ruin of my attempts to reduce the Stack.

My first impression of the game is that it’s Bridge Builder crossed with Gish. Which is unfortunate, because those are both obscure enough titles that I’m going to have to explain them now. Bridge Builder (and its sequel Pontifex) is exactly what it sounds like: a heavily physics-based game in which you have to design river-spanning bridges that don’t collapse under their own weight under various physical and budgetary constraints. Gish, which is on the Stack still, is a gothy 2D platformer about a sentient blob of tar. Coincidentally (and somewhat oddly), these two games were made by the same team. Or perhaps it’s not coincidence: I’ve detected what may be shout-outs to Bridge Builder in WoG‘s first world, suggesting that 2D Boy is a fan of theirs, or at least aware of them.

But to this a third influence must be added: Lemmings, with its chirruping doomed wee creatures that need your help to escape. The goal in each level of WoG is to help the roaming goo balls to reach an outflow pipe, usually by building a bridge to it out of their living bodies, which are most easily connected in triangular grids. Some species of goo can be detached and reused, others are effectively killed the moment you join them to your expanding structure. All survivors are sent to a special area with a competitive metagoal: build as tall a tower as you can, while clouds representing the tower-heights of other players on the net loom tauntingly overhead.

Even though I’m still in the lower ranks hieght-wise, I’m finding it gratifying to look at the details on those clouds and snicker at how much less efficient they are than mine — “He has twice as many pieces as me, and he’s only just a little way above me!” I only wish I could see their structures, rather than just their stats, because I’m curious about how other people are building their structures. (I suppose I should try Google. People must be posting screenshots.) My own best efforts are Eiffel-Tower-like: I start by making as large and as regular a triangle as I can, then when it’s thick enough, I start mining out the middle bits that aren’t needed for support any more, and put them up top. The broadness of the base, even when it’s reduced to a pair of legs, tends to minimize the structure’s wobble.

And yet it still wobbles. Wobbling is pretty much the point of goo; the whole game is built around what’s been called “jell-o physics”. For this reason, screenshots really don’t communicate the gameplay very well. You can look a picture of a nice slim tower and not realize that it’s swaying back and forth with an arc larger than the screen.

In a some ways, Braid is 2008’s Portal. Like Portal, it’s a puzzle-platformer that’s a critical hit despite being completable in a matter of a few hours (and despite being a puzzle game, for that matter), but in both cases, this is because there’s so little repetition and filler. Also like Portal, it’s a game based around grasping the unintuitive consequences of one simple idea. In Braid, that idea is control of time.

In other words, it’s the same underlying concept as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. But PoP:TSoT was an action game, and thus had a reason to limit the use of time-control capabilities, lest it make the action too easy. Braid is a puzzle game, and lets you rewind as much as you want. Ironically, this means that Braid can contain action sequences far more intense than any you find in PoP. There are bits toward the end where I was constantly doing fractional-second rewinds in order to get things just right. It’s crazy how fast you get used to that. But when you think about it, playing a conventional action game also involves frequent irregularities in the flow of game-time, in the form of quickloads and reversions to save points, and the player usually isn’t bothered by this. The difference here is just a matter of degree.

Mind you, PoP‘s rewind system wasn’t very well-suited for puzzles: it let you go back in time and change stuff, but only in the simplest and most consequence-free way. To make puzzles, you need variations on the theme. The first and simplest variation in Braid is that some objects aren’t affected by your rewinding, and keep on moving forward. The freakiest variation — and my favorite — is the series of levels where the flow of time for everything other than the player character is a function of your position: move rightward and time advances, move leftward and it rewinds. Notably, this really throws a monkey wrench into the ingrained habits of 2D platforming. You can’t just stand there and wait for things to get into the right position for you, and in particular, if something is in your way, you can’t wait for it to move. It won’t move until you do.

If you take away the temporal weirdification, it’s a 2D platformer with mechanics that greatly resemble Super Mario Brothers, and the game runs with that, giving us monsters blatantly modeled on goombas and piranha plants, a princess who’s eternally “in another castle”, and so forth. SMB references seem to have become to indie games what Winsor McCay references are to indie cartoons: a way for the artist to establish cred by showing an appreciation for the true classics of the medium or whatever. Braid plays around with the princess premise in its between-levels text, first making it mundane, portraying (the player character) Tim’s pursuit of the Princess as occurring in the aftermath of a failed relationship with her, but then after a while turning it into something more abstract. The Princess is the eternal and non-specific object-of-pursuit, the thing which will make everything better once you find it, and which you therefore take terrible risks to discover, despite the uncertainty of your success. (In the epilogue, this is linked to science, and the development of the atom bomb, leading some to conclude that Tim is a nuclear physicist and the whole game is his guilt trip about his work on the Manhattan project. But I think that’s an over-literal reading of one example, among many presented, of where the generalized pursuit of Princesses leads.) The strangest part is that there’s a point where the stories of the mundane and eternal princesses overlap, where Tim leaves his significant other because he feels driven to go and find the Princess. Some have interpreted this as simply indicating that the woman he leaves here isn’t the one referred to earlier as the Princess, but I think the idea that he leaves her in order to find her fits well with the time wackiness. Sometimes Tim does things backwards.

And besides, the whole thing is driven by dream logic. The text is very clear that Tim is confused and his memories are blurred (as you might expect from someone who keeps changing his own past). The backgrounds are blurry in an impressionistic way (which makes the parallax scrolling look really nice for some reason). The level-selection areas are clouds, for crying out loud. Apparently there’s been something of a backlash against the pretentiousness and vagueness of the story, but I think that’s taking it all too literally. Some people seem to resent what they see as the author forcing the audience to make up the story when that’s clearly the author’s job. But I don’t feel like I’m being forced to do any such thing, because this is not a story-driven game. The story fragments are there as a frame, and do a nice job of providing things for the gameplay elements to be metaphors for, but it’s clear that the game came first and the metaphors were chosen to fit it. The big exception is the final level, where the gameplay comes to comment on the story quite directly, turning the rescue its head. Well, we’re told in the very beginning that the Princess’ captivity is Tim’s fault, the result of a mistake that he spends the entire game trying to go back and correct.

OK, let’s try to analyze this a little. The Next Tetris practice level 19, “Zipper”, has the initial layout pictured here. There are seven rows of garbage squares. Only the bottommost row — the grey one — counts for completing the level, but the gap in that row can only be accessed by fist getting rid of the row above it, which in turn needs the row above that deleted, and so on. The level is supposed to be completed in nine moves, which means adding 36 squares to the board. There are 18 empty spaces, which leaves 18 squares to lump up on top. The board is 10 squares wide, so at most one additional row above the initial garbage can be filled, leaving 8 squares left at the end. One of the big questions here is whether it’s worthwhile to try to complete such an extra row.

Here are the nine pieces, in the order they appear:

(Recall that color is significant. Blocks of the same color fuse together and fall as a unit, while a piece composed of multiple colors will break apart upon first coming to rest. This has some non-obvious consequences. For example, if you drop the first piece here the opposite way up into one of the gaps on this board, it’ll stay the shape it is until you delete the first row, at which point the right side will fall one row farther than the left side, and the red squares on both sides will stick together, forming a unit two squares wide.)

Now, all of the gaps in the initial layout are one square wide. Of the 36 squares that compose our nine pieces, 11 have a horizontal neighbor of the same color no matter how they’re rotated, and thus cannot possibly fit into a one-square-wide gap. Let’s call these “blocker squares”. Another 11 squares are directly attached to blocker squares of the same color. If these are placed in a gap, the adjacent blocker square will have to be above it, preventing access to any further gaps in that column, unless you can complete that extra row and delete it. The remaining 14 squares are detached units or straght columns that can be used to freely fill in whatever needs them, provided they don’t glob onto something else of the same color and get stuck.

The obvious thing to do with the straight piece (or “I” piece) is to put it in the 4-deep straight hole on the right. But obviousness is no guarantee of correctness — the I could also very well fill the vertically-arranged four gaps in the very middle. This works well with the level’s name — the I is like the zipper that pulls downward through the middle and tears the whole structure apart. Also, the I is a color that isn’t used in any of the other pieces, which makes it more useful in the middle, where it helps to keep things from getting stuck to each other. But if you put it there, you’ll have to come up with some other way to fill in the straight gap, and nothing else fits quite as easily. Filling an extra row is almost necessary in such a scheme.

Two other pieces are of special note. The 2-by-2 block (or “O”) is composed entirely of blocker squares, and is of no use whatever for filling gaps in the garbage. It’s also composed of a color almost unused otherwise, so it isn’t much use as a complication either: just throw it to the side and it won’t interfere. This makes me think that it serves in the puzzle to help complete the extra row. At this point, there’s so much circumstantial evidence in favor of the extra row hypothesis that I’ll be really surprised if it’s wrong.

The other is the final piece, the green “S”. Because it’s the last piece, it has to either fill in the final gap, or trigger a cascade that fills it in. On purely aesthetic grounds, I suspect that a final cascade won’t involve only part of the initial layout. Either the garbage above the goal row will all be gone by the time this piece is placed, or it’ll all still be there. In the latter case, there’s some difficulty in placing the S. This scenario requires all but one of the gappy columns to be capped with a tower of pieces waiting to fall into place. The only original gap that could possibly accommodate the S in this situation is the straight pit on the right, which would have to have three pieces in it already and have nothing on its left to keep the S out; this could clearly only happen if an extra row had been deleted. Alternately, the S itself could complete the extra row.

So, I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s probably an extra row to be built and deleted, and the I could plausibly go in the middle. I’ll have to try things along these lines the next time I play.

Well, I’m still stuck on that last practice level. It’s a toughie.

The puzzle title is “Zipper”. It features filled and unfilled squares in a checkerboard pattern, which means that whenever you use a piece that’s more than one column wide (after taking splitting by color into account), you’ll wind up with an overhanging bit that prevents you from filling in the space beneath it. Recall that pieces (or piece fragments) of the same color stick together, potentially fusing into a piece that’s more than one column wide after you’ve placed them. This makes this puzzle unique among the practice levels in that the challenge has a lot to do with not just making the most of the pieces you’ve got, but also finding ways of getting rid of the ones you don’t want.

At one point, I was about ready to give up on this one. I hit Gamefaqs, hoping to find a nudge in the right direction. And indeed there is a guide to the practice levels there! It even features nice gentle hints, describing the general approach you have to take for each puzzle and letting you work out the details yourself. It’s always a relief to find well-written hints. Far too often the hint-writers just give everything away. Unfortunately, the person who wrote these hints couldn’t figure the last puzzle either, so it’s not a lot of use to me.

What an terrible title! Not only is it far from distinctive — a completely different Tetris variant called The New Tetris was released around the same time — it’s also quite arrogant. Or at least it is if you interpret it as “The thing that will be as significant to game culture as Tetris was”, as in “Every game designer hopes that their creation will be the next Tetris“. If you interpret it as “One more Tetris among many”, it’s a bit less so. Under that view, it even implies that the gameplay is so generic that they couldn’t come up with a descriptive title. Which isn’t really true: The Next Tetris delivered some genuine innovation within the Tetris format, subsequently reused in other titles. Instead of making every block completely static once it’s finished falling, staying with its row even when isolated and unsupported, TNT makes blocks only stick together if they’re the same color and fall otherwise. Delete a row, and bits of the row above have the potential to fill in gaps in the row below, potentially making Bejewelled-like cascades. To promote this kind of behavior, the designers decided to make two-color pieces that have the potential to split apart immediately on placement, if placed right.

Doesn’t this all make it easier? Well, yes. Yes it does. Even ignoring the potential for cascades, the frangibility of the pieces means that you don’t need to spend so much time waiting for the straight piece to come up. The designers compensate for the increased ease with horrible, horrible time limits.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. The main game here is, for me, a sideline. The real reason I picked this game up is that I learned Scott Kim was involved in its creation. Although he’s probably still best-known for his invertable calligraphy, Kim is also an accomplished puzzlesmith with about a dozen games under his belt. Among them is Obsidian, which provided me with one of the most beautifully transcendent moments of realization I’ve experienced in a lifetime of gaming. ¹Figuring out the override for the non-regulation flight, in case you’ve played it and were wondering. This memory was still fresh in my mind when TNT came out.

Kim’s specific contribution to TNT is a series of puzzle levels — yes, real puzzles, with designed solutions which you can discover by thinking about them, rather than the random configurations and speed play of normal Tetris and most other so-called “puzzle” games. In each, you’re given a fixed initial board and a fixed sequence of pieces, and you have a figure out how to delete the initial “garbage” in the minimum number of moves. (If you exceed par, the game lets you keep playing, but you know you’ve failed.) Some of them seem to be just a matter of trying different configurations until one works, but the better ones have some gimmick, some underlying principle that makes the whole thing easy when you think of it. For example, in the screenshot included here, the trick is to make the blocks into an inverted copy of the empty space, so that everything just cascades into place when the final piece unlocks the whole structure.

The puzzle levels are not a large part of the game, or one that it draws a great deal of attention to. I suspect that there are people who have played TNT a great deal who don’t even know they exist, just as I ignore multiplayer mode on most games. They’re listed under the main menu as “Practice Mode”, which is a lie: practicing the main game by playing these levels would be like practicing swimming by taking a long shower. It involves the same elements, but applied in a different way. Normal Tetris doesn’t allow you to replay the same situation over and over until you get it right, and that makes a huge difference. So does the certain knowledge that there is, in fact, a solution. You can’t blame the random number generator for your problems. No, you’d have to blame Scott Kim.

There are 19 practice mode levels. In my last session, I solved all but one, although not in order. If it takes me more than one more session to figure out the last, I will be sad.

After all the side-quests were done, I had two options for the end: enter Lord Bane’s citadel, or follow my sword as the necromancers instructed. I did go so far as to try the latter, but when you do so, you get some dire warnings from Princess Serephine (who threatens to leave you if you continue on that course) and a final opportunity to chicken out, which I took. I may play through again with another character class, and if I do I’ll definitely want to give the alternate ending a look. But for now, Bartonia is safe.

Beating Lord Bane took me five tries, with various different collections of stuff, including some items I forged specifically for this fight. Lord Bane’s basic trick is that he casts spells that make him more powerful. For each element, he has a spell that destroys all of that element on the board and increases his mastery of that element by the number of gems destroyed, and in addition, his equipment makes his elemental masteries benefit him in other ways. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is his shield, which gives him +1 to all resistances for every 3 points of Earth mastery. So if you let him get enough Earth mastery, your spells start fizzling more and more. As I see it, there are three things you can do to overcome this. First, you can do what you can to hurt him with spells at the beginning of the fight, before he can resist it. Second, you can try to forestall his resistance by having high earth resistance yourself (to keep him from casting the spell that raises his earth mastery) and by using up the green gems on the board before he gets them. Third, you can increase the damage you do when matching skulls so that you’re less dependent on spells to kill him.

Here’s the combination of equipment that ultimately worked for me:

• Spells: Channel Air, Entangle, Forest Fire, Sanctuary, Lightning Storm, Charge!
• Equipment: Quartz Relic (+5 damage for each full mana reserve, +8 Air Resistance), Armor of Minogoth (prevents 1 point of damage when you receive 2 or more, +15 Earth Resistance), Deep Edge (+6 damage when you do 6 or more damage, +8 Earth Resistance), Frozen Harp (+4 to all mana reserves when you match 4 or 5, +8 Fire Resistance)
• Mount: a level 8 Wyvern (Rend spell, +6 to Battle skill)

By this point, I had enough Battle skill that just matching three skulls did 6 damage, and thus triggered the Deep Edge bonus. Like I said, I wanted Earth resistance more than any other kind, but this loadout provides a certain amount of resistance in all elements (water resistance being provided by one of the companions). As for the spells, I basically didn’t use Sancutary (adds to your resistance in a randomly-chosen element) at all, and would have swapped it out for something else if I had to give the fight another try. The most useful spells were Entangle and Charge!, both good for setting up moves; if you can get a foursome out of them, they can almost pay for themselves, given the effect of the Harp. Charge! is notable in that it takes advantage of the board in ways that Lord Bane can’t, so it’s relatively safe to cast when he has high resistance: you lose an opportunity, but at least that opportunity can’t be used against you. In the end, despite Lord Bane’s increased resistance, I struck the final blow with the direct-damage spell Forest Fire.

All in all, this was a satisfying game. Tile-matching games provide one of the purest experiences of flow, and RPGs, with their promises of greater power if you keep leveling, provide buckets of player motivation even when the gameplay isn’t particularly compelling, so it’s a winning combination. And on top of that, it has excellent production values. I haven’t even mentioned the sound: cascades involve one of the best thunderclap sounds I’ve heard in a game, and the background music has prominent bassoon solos. (Or possibly english horn. It can be hard to tell sometimes. Regardless, it’s a good thing.) I understand there’s a sequel due out soon, with a sci-fi setting and hexagonal tiles. I’ll definitely be playing that when it’s released for PC, which will probably happen months after it’s released for everything else.

I started off this whole series of posts by comparing Puzzle Quest to Bookworm Adventures, and I’m not the only one to make that comparison. It’s a pretty obvious comparison to make, since they’re two of the only representatives of the Puzzle/RPG Fusion genre. But now that I’ve experienced them both more fully, when I look at them side by side, BA seems little more than a proof-of-concept, while PQ is a full-fledged game, as complete and complex as any RPG on the market. I’m probably being a little unfair to BA because of its length, but even taking that into account, PQ has a more involved system of stats, provides more freedom of action on the main board, and gives you more options during combat — which is a little strange, because I’d call the underlying tile-matching mechanic weaker in that respect than BA‘s word-making. It seems to me that the main reason for this is PQ‘s decision to make both sides use the same board. BA had the computer opponent not act on the board at all — instead, it just hit at you and did damage. This meant that your actions on the board didn’t affect what the opponent could do, which put limits on the kinds of tactics that the game could support.

I also compared Puzzle Quest to strategy games such as Heroes of Might and Magic. It turns out that there’s a closer connection than I suspected: PQ officially takes place in the same campaign setting as the Warlords series (hence its subtitle, “Challenge of the Warlords”). I’ve played a couple of the Warlords games, long ago, but I’m basically not familiar enough with their trivia to recognize the names of its gods and kingdoms and so forth; apparently to a real Warlords fan, the connection would be obvious the moment the game said “Bartonia” or “Lord Bane”. Anyway, Warlords is basically the thing that Heroes of Might and Magic stole most of its ideas from, including the whole business of besieging cities, and running around to collect regularly-replenished resources. So now we have a direct reason for those elements to be present in PQ.

One final comparison. There is at least one blatant PQ imitation on the market: BattleJewels, a game written primarily for those few handheld platforms too geeky for PQ to run on (such as PalmOS and GP2X). Except that apparently it’s not an imitation: according to the developer, Stephen Bickham, it was in development for years before PQ was announced, and his real inspiration was Magic: the Gathering, so the massive similarity is just coincidental. Well, I’ve already noted how PQ has some M:tG-like aspects, so that part is believable. And there are some significant gameplay differences: BJ by default doesn’t refill empty slots, and it doesn’t have the whole campaign scenario and map treatment (being more geared towards PvP). To me, the campaign is a large part of the charm of the game, so I don’t feel compelled to plunge into BJ‘s context-free fights. In their basics, though, the two games are amazingly similar, even down to the choice of skulls for the damage tiles. But I’m not saying Bickham ripped off PQ, like many others have. For one thing, for all I know maybe PQ is the rip-off, and for another, there’s been such a general exhaustion of the possible variations on match-3 in recent years that it’s inevitable that some would be used more than once. Anyway, you can compare them for yourself, as both games have downloadable demos. PQ‘s has limited content, BJ‘s is nagware.

It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be funneling me towards another potentially regrettable decision.

There have been several choice points in the game so far. The first one occurs when you’re told to recruit Syrus Darkhunter, famous slayer of undead. When you first meet Syrus, he asks for your help capturing a necromancer named Moarg and bringing him to a prison in a city where Syrus is unwilling to set foot. Why won’t he set foot there? He refuses to say. Moarg, on the other hand, is quite willing to give you information, provided you set him free. Now, as far as I’m concerned, Syrus has only himself to blame if I don’t trust him. I’ve had experiences in D&D with NPCs who were supposedly on my side but who put everyone’s safety in jeapordy by withholding plot-crucial information for no good reason, and this scenario reminded me of that a lot. (See also Yeesha vs. Esher.) So I accepted Moarg’s proposition, hoping that his intelligence would be more valuable than Syrus’ assistance. It turns out that it wasn’t particularly valuable, but to my surprise, I got Syrus’ assistance anyway, due to my character lying to him.

Only in Lord Bane’s realm, when we were fighting Moarg’s colleagues, were my unintentional lies exposed. And so Syrus left the party — not a great loss, since his “10 damage to undead at the start of battle” is a mere drop in the bucket at this point, but still, a loss. I suspect it might have been possible to keep him by temporarily disbanding him before fighting the necromancers, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Removing people from your party is something you don’t usually don’t have any reason to do in this game, sort of like closing doors behind you in an adventure game.

Another early choice involved a potential ally who wanted me to escort his daughter to another city, where she’d be forced into a loveless political marriage. Once more, I struck a blow for freedom and against keeping promises, gaining the princess as a party member and incurring some extra encounters later on when her father sent soldiers to get her back. In general, though, other choices have been less morally ambiguous — things like choosing whether to return a magic item to its rightful owner or keep it for yourself. (I’ve been forging my own magic items anyway, thank you very much.)

That choice about Moarg, though, apparently “started me down the dark path”, if the necros are to be believed, and there’s someting I can do with a sword Moarg gave me if I “want to know true power”. I kind of want to defeat Lord Bane and achieve my primary mission objectives for the whole game, but I’m also curious about what the bad guys are so eager to show me. So far, their one big claim to power is that when they die, Lord Bane just raises them from the dead again. And as the player, I have that power already.

I seem to be approaching the end of the game. At least, I’ve reached the vicinity of the castle of Lord Bane, God of Death and primary antagonist, who’s appeared personally a couple of times to taunt me and set his minions on me. I’m also nearly up to character level 50, which may or may not be the highest attainable level — it’s certainly the last point at which you get a new spell just for levelling.

At this point, a couple of things are happening to change gameplay. First, my opponents and I have high enough skills all round that any move has a significant chance of being followed by a free extra turn, especially if there are combos and cascades involved. Things can change very rapidly without your being able to do anything about it. Second, elemental resistance is becoming a large factor.

The way elemental resistance works is this: Each side has a percentage rating in all four elements. That percentage is the chance that a spell cast by the enemy will fail if it uses the relevant color of mana. Resistances don’t usually go very high — the highest I’ve seen was a Fire Elemental that had something like a 30% resistance to red. Still, even a 10% resistance is enough to put paid to certain tactics. For most of the game, I’ve been making heavy use of Entangle, a spell that makes your opponent skip a number of turns determined by your green mana reserves. Whenever there were multiple sets of skulls ready to go off, or other tempting targets, I’d cast Entangle to get them all — not even necessarily to get them myself, but to keep them from being used against me. In other words, I was using it at exactly those moments when I least want to risk losing a turn to a miscast and giving the enemy first crack at everything.

Resistance isn’t the only thing that’s making spells useless. Some of the more advanced undead have abilities that drain green mana, making it a lot harder to cast spells with green components. Now, I know a lot of spells, but you’re only allowed to take six of them at a time with you into combat (plus a seventh determined by your mount). I’ve been making only occasional adjustments to my loadout through most of the game, as I learn new spells or decide to experiment with new tactics, but now I’m starting to pick my inventory on an enemy-by-enemy basis. I commented before on emergent changes in effective tactics. It’s nice to see that this is still going on, in a reasonably unforced way, this late in the game.

At its core, the way you interact with Puzzle Quest is identical to the way you interact with Bejewelled. On a PC with a mouse, this means that you have two ways of swapping gems: either click on the two gems that you want to swap, or hold and drag one gem in the direction of the thing you want to swap it with. Either of these two input methods suffices for any swap you can make, and indeed it took me a while to notice that two existed. I’ve been clicking rather than dragging, and only discovered the dragging version accidentally, when my hand joggled too far during a click — something that’s happened often enough that I wish I could turn the dragging off. It isn’t even just a harmless annoyance: when you accidentally enter an invalid swap — which is to say, one that doesn’t form a row of 3 or more — you lose 5 hit points and your turn ends. The hit points don’t hurt so much, but failing to act can be devastating.

The presentation, though, can and does go beyond that of Bejewelled, for the simple reason that there’s more to present. There’s a good deal of information on the screen — hit points, mana levels, spell names and costs — and even more available through tootips — both combatants’ skills, the effects of their equipment, descriptions of spell effects. Whenever any aspect of the game state changes, the change is indicated through glowy particle effects over the appropriate part of the display. This is a nice touch. I’m seldom watching the particle effects, since they occur at the exact moment that the board changes and I’m anxiously scanning it for exploitable patterns, but they register in a near-subliminal way.