Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 Has Excellent Match-3 Battles But An Exhausting Sense Of Humor

If your main exposure to match-3 titles comes from the likes of Candy Crush and similar games that serve primarily as ad delivery vehicles, you might be surprised at how good and how varied the genre can be. I’ve written before about the novel reinvention of match-3 in Kaamos, launching later in April, but this month also sees the release of another inventive puzzle adventure from one of the most exciting indie developers around.

In the past few years, Strange Scaffold has been on a steady run of fascinating and original games, like I Am Your Beast, Clickolding, and El Paso, Elsewhere. Now, the studio is turning its attention to a familiar form of puzzle game and putting its unique stamp on it. Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 was announced just two months before its release, with a demo showing off just how far it twists the structure of typical match-3 games.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 positions itself as the third game in a series that doesn’t actually exist. You play as J.J. Hardwell, a special agent who idolizes Jack Briar, the protagonist of those nonexistent games, exploring a mansion where dinosaur clones created by evil scientists coexist alongside supernatural creatures. That’s all wrapped up in a metafictional narrative with characters understanding that they’re in a video game and using that to their advantage.

The core of Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is its match-3 battles that at first look like something you might see in the classic Puzzle Quest, but with layer upon layer of mechanical experimentation that makes every battle feel distinct. The basics of combat are exactly what you’d expect: You take turns with an opponent sliding colored gems on a board to make matches of three or more. Some gems, depicted as knives, do direct damage, while others must be collected to use skills.

The first twist is that combat isn’t always just about whittling down opponents’ hitpoints. Sometimes the goal is simply to climb a fence or find an item, and only making one type of match will get you closer to that goal. Other times, enemies have so much health they can’t be taken down by normal means, and you’ll need to shift your strategy to using specific skills to win.

J.J.’s own skills are constantly changing in Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. Some battles introduce custom skills, and often custom gems, that don’t appear anywhere else and are tied to that fight’s unique mechanics. But J.J. can also gain skills by simply exploring the mansion. Act like a secret agent enough and you might unlock more action movie hero skills. Throw out your shoulder and you can gain access to a new shoulder bash attack.

These skills also come into play between battles, and that’s also where you’ll acquire many of them. Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 leans hard into its game-within-a-game story, meaning you’ll frequently return to the same parts of the mansion when you get a game over or hit some impassable obstacle. As you move from room to room, you’ll decide where J.J. goes next and how he responds to threats, with all possibilities laid out on a branching map it’s your job to uncover every corner of. Skills you earn by making choices in one part of the mansion can open paths in another, and even when you find yourself repeating battles thanks to this looping structure, they often play out differently based on what skills you’ve picked up in the meantime.

Returning to old encounters can sometimes get old, but there’s enough variation in them to keep it from feeling like you’re just walking in circles.

Where Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3’s fourth wall breaking shtick didn’t work nearly as well for me was in its story. Characters talk about very little else other than the fact they’re stuck in a game, and hardly a sentence can go by without some wink-wink reference to game development. Even aside from that bit, its writing is over-the-top wacky at every moment, and while it’s sometimes very funny, the relentlessly goofy tone is exhausting. I’m sure less grouchy players will feel differently, but I found most of the game’s writing insufferable.

Fortunately, no one can force you to read dialogue boxes, and when Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 isn’t beating you over the head with extra-strength silliness, it’s an excellent twist on the match-3 genre. It nails the fundamentals of its puzzle battles while making every one unique, and the process of combing the mansion for new skills and alternate paths offers another layer of strategy. It may not be as groundbreaking as Strange Scaffold’s best work, but it’s an inventive and fun experiment nonetheless.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is available now on PC.