Puzzle Games. This genre at first glance may not attract players because of its simplicity but it can still appeal to those who want challenges in their games beyond shooting and card-strategy. There’s a spectrum of puzzle games that range from slices of sheer brilliance to nothing short of slack-jawed horror. So, what’s it going to be for Puzzle Royale?

Puzzle Royale is a tile-matching game that has roleplaying game elements. Aaron Yee, the CEO, along with five other individuals make up the core team of the project. Although their picture and names were published in their whitepaper, there are no extensive details about their experiences. It’s also not specified if they’re working as a company. Their social links aren’t given so keeping track of how successful their past ideas were is difficult. Partnerships aren’t posted on their website and whitepaper as well. This would lead people to believe that they don’t have a community of players to support them and without that, things can easily fall apart.  

Puzzle Royale’s official game release should’ve been in Q2 2022 but it’s delayed until further notice. The gameplay is a mix of sliding puzzle with monster battle in 8-bit graphics. This may seem like not much but it's enough for mobile games, making the storage requirement lighter. In Puzzle Royale, the player will assemble their own team of powerful-willed NFT heroes to battle for the fallen throne in hopes of restoring stability. The combat mechanics in the game demo is represented by match-3 on a tile board with 5 gem colors representing the elements. Matching 3 or more tiles of the same element causes the gems to charge up their column doing damage to the first enemy they strike. The gameplay is like Bejeweled but with RPG elements. Players can earn in PvP and PvE rewards or trade their rare hero NFTs obtained in a gacha system.

Match-3 games are common. Bejeweled and Candy Crush are famous examples. Hundreds of these are floating around in cloned forms like Puzzle Royale. Its interface is simple, it’s colorful and audio cues aren't actually needed. Games like this are perfect to play if you have minutes to waste.

However, in my opinion, these games are shallow and broken. Some part of the gameplay is crippled by flaws that can push the player into boring play. It has a lot of randomness. When you clear some pieces, everything settles to the top which opens up space at the bottom where new pieces flood in. It’s very likely that these new pieces will create additional matches so the majority of matched combos you do aren’t things you orchestrated, they’re accidents. Sure, you can spend minutes studying the board to know one perfect move to cause a massive chain of matches. But you can also spend those minutes just randomly clicking and you’ll still get points. Here, playing randomly is like playing judiciously.

Then eventually, new pieces will be in arrangement where the top rows won’t have any valid swaps. So, there is a possibility for the board to lock up because no matter how well you play, you’re not going to change the content of the top rows and you don’t have control on what new pieces would go in below. Once there are no valid moves, the band-aid solution is to reset the whole board to keep it going. That for me seems to indicate a fundamental problem with the design.

As a way for Puzzle Royale to fix the problem above, they’ve added hero super-skill and special tiles where it can be something to clear a row or column to get the board moving again. From here, the game gets even more chaotic and random. You get lots of sounds, colors and particle effects and you’ll feel like you’re making stuff happen when you’re not.

Obviously, games like these are still popular and I’m not saying it’s completely awful. I’m just saying it's a very disposable game where players are considered “good” based on how fast they’re clicking. For me, P2E projects like this with easy mechanics that give players an abundance of rewards will not nurture long-term player commitment, though they may bring a bumper crop of short-term participation, it will not encourage long-term growth. For this reason, it may not be profitable in the long run. Still, I give Puzzle Royale the credit for taking in this boring, click-fest-sliding-puzzle genre and combining it with RPG battle.