I have to assume everyone reading this has played Bejeweled at one point or another. At least, I remember seeing so many people playing that game on their non-smart phones and in web browser windows a few years back. If you aren't familiar, it's a very basic grid-based puzzle game (much like Tetris or Hexic or Dr. Mario) in which the goal is to line up three gems of the same color. When you do so, they'll disappear, and gravity will pull all the gems above those down to fill in the holes, complete with new random gems coming in from the top of the screen. You can create combos in this way, linking three yellow gems together, say, and seeing a red gem fall into the newly-created gap only to connect with two other red gems, giving you that combination as well. It's a game that has seen so many different variants and styles that I can't even tell if there's an actual original set of Bejeweled rules that people still play by. Regardless, I was never a huge fan, mostly because the appeal of the game seemed hampered by its luck factor - depending on which new jewels appeared at the top of the screen, you could end up with any sort of game. I think I bought the game for my cell phone during a lengthy lecture block in college, and only even played it once or twice. Anyway, at some point along the way I heard of Puzzle Quest, a game which was supposed to be like Bejeweled with strategy and RPG elements, and when I saw it being sold on Amazon for six bucks, I made the plunge. I'm glad I did, because Puzzle Quest was such an easy game to fall right into. The Internet at large quoted the game as taking 35 to 50 hours to beat. Fortunately, I made it through in what couldn't have been more than 20, and most of those hours qualified as double-logging duty, as I played the game in front of a whole lot of Dexter and How I Met Your Mother. I'm sure there are some questions just burning away at you right now, so I'll go ahead and answer them. Yes, the game was in fact an RPG of sorts. You travel a world map, get new quests at different towns and cities, gain experience, level up, acquire new skills, encounter random enemies from time to time, equip a selection of weapons and armor, and even have other people join your party. However, the combat is entirely Bejeweled-based, as you and your opponent take turns lining up gems. Line up skulls to damage your enemy, line up gold coins to acquire gold coins, line up purple stars to gain experience, and line up colored gems to gather mana. Use mana to cast spells, some of which heal you, some of which harm your enemy, and some of which alter the puzzle board itself. It's such a simple premise, and yet there were so many different ways to play the game due to the breadth of spells and items. As with any other RPG with customizable characterization, you could take many different routes, between a "warrior" type who can absorb a lot of damage but serves up a lot of it too, or maybe a "healer" type who can turn battles into wars of attrition by recovering health every turn. My own character was a "druid" whose specialty was altering the colors of the gems on the board. I'm sure that had I been some other type of character, I'd have played the game in a very different way; my strategy by the end of the game was to deal damage with skulls whenever possible, but aside from that to build up my mana reserves as quickly as possible and start chaining together magic attacks. I was worried at first that the appeal of the game wouldn't hold up for forty hours, but if anything the game got more and more interesting as I acquired new items and abilities and had to face harder opponents. I mean, with so many games on my backlog, I'm never one to lament the completion of any game, but I'd be lying if I said no small part of me wanted this game to just keep on going. It looks like two sequels exist for handhelds and the PSN/XBLA gaming services, and I could easily see myself purchasing and playing those games at some point. But not yet. Not yet.
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