My memories of playing match-3 games largely take place on airplanes. My country’s airline – the best in the world, shout out to Singapore Airlines – used to have Bejeweled on its in-flight gaming system, which meant I spent a lot of time in the pre-smartphone days whiling away long hours at 30,000 feet matching gems.
It also had a whole bunch of Nintendo games, including Pokemon Gold/Silver. Man, those really were the good old days.
I also used to play a lot of Homescapes on my iPhone in university. I had undiagnosed ADHD, okay? I just needed something to occupy my hands. My point is, match-3 games aren’t exactly the pinnacle of modern gaming. They’re games you play to turn your brain off and keep your fingers busy.
Meet Your Match-3
But Strange Scaffold, characteristically, has managed to create a match-3 game that’s not just compelling, but incredibly weird. You might recognise the studio from their other, weird games: the deeply disturbing clicker game Clickolding, frenetic FPS I Am Your Beast (this one made our own Ben Sledge nearly throw up), bullet-time third-person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere, and grisly kidnapping simulator Life Eater. The studio feels like a kid defiantly asking, ‘Why not?’ every time they’re told they can’t do something. It makes some of the strangest indies I’ve ever seen, and I love it for that.
Its upcoming game, Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, is in the same vein. It’s not just a match-3 game, of course, that would be too simple for Strange Scaffold. CRDM3 is a horror comedy, part match-3 game, part metroidvania, and part choice-based narrative. You play as J.J. Hardwell, a hapless, somewhat cowardly government employee who’s been forced by his employer to go into a creepy mansion and make sure there isn’t any illegal dinosaur activity going on. Alas, there is.
His first task is to get through the giant metal gate at the front of the mansion. Overcoming obstacles is where the match-3 element comes in – on your turns, you’ll take action and use skills by accumulating symbols in your bank. Your obstacles may also fight back on their turns. In this case, the gate cut me, reducing my health.
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These match-3 games can be surprisingly challenging, considering you’re often up against opponents with their own skills and health. There’s a lot of strategy involved in trying to thwart your enemies’ attempts to get the symbols they want while simultaneously getting the ones you need. One enemy I encountered had a skill that emptied my symbol bank. Another cleared a three by three grid on the board. It’s inventive and surprising at every turn.
You’ll learn skills as you go, through your choices or through winning battles. A book might fall through a rift, teaching you how to pick locks, but you can also choose to inspect the rift instead and learn something new about the world. At one point, I chose to inspect a feather a bird dinosaur left behind instead of looting its body, and after ruminating on its beauty, J.J. commented, “So much detail… that no one would ever notice. Is every game like this?”
What Happens When Sequels Die?
Oh, right, that’s another important thing about CRDM3. You don’t make it very far into the demo before J.J. finds out he’s in a video game. A strange bartender, supposedly the villain of the story, puts him in debugging mode so he remembers things between deaths and sends him on his way. You have to explore the mansion, making different choices with every venture out into its hallways, and debug the things that are clearly not working right.
Even more intriguing, at the end of the demo, we find out that Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 has been cancelled. J.J. is trapped in the game, and god knows how he’s going to get out. At its core, CRDM3 isn’t really about what we think it is: it’s about sequels, game development, and according to its Steam description, “the horrible, beautiful things that happen when the foundation of your reality falls apart”.
After an hour with its Steam demo, I’m completely sold. It’s a tightly designed game, and while I don’t know where it’s going, I’m willing to go wherever Strange Scaffold takes me. Who knew I could be this emotionally invested in a match-3 game? You can try it for yourself here.
RPG
Match 3
Survival Horror
- Released
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2025
- Developer(s)
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Strange Scaffold
- Publisher(s)
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Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop
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