Tumblestone turned up in a recent Humble Monthly package. I initially thought this was a competitive multiplayer puzzle genre game, as it turns out there's a huge single player component and you can forget the MP entirely if you just like to SP like me.

Can new things be done with the match-3 genre? Well, yes. Yes it can.

The story starts off with the Queen of the Nile who's walk is prevented by Tumblestones. Coloured blocked that can be chucked and that vanish if linked with others of the same colour. As the game progresses the task of removing them is passed to various characters.

It is all light hearted and has decent humour to it. There's nothing too major, it is just there to place some breaks in the levels. Totally skipable if you just want to play the actual game. The store page boasts a 40+ hour campaign, which I can believe. The downside is that it can feel like a huge slog to get through and a reminded to take a break every so often from it.

Each individual character has no direct abilities of their own, but face additional challenges in the level design based on what the previous one learnt.

In MP mode you can select what character you do want to play as, but this is purely visual and offers no direct benefits. On playing some games where the opposite is true I can see the decision in doing so here to avoid imbalanced characters.

Rather than throwing a coloured block into a chain to remove from the screen, Tumblestone has you select three from the playfield. This becomes a game of unwrapping the layout from top level down and can initially feel overly simple. The first few levels are basic tutorial stuff and you should breeze right past them.

Over time more advanced techniques are learnt. Starting with the fact that selecting a tumblestone immediately removes it from play allowing you to select the one directly underneath it.

When you move on to the Goblin King you have to deal with phase-blockers. Every time you select a tumblestone, the blocker will swap from blocking everything above it to allowing you to pass and select one. Since it requires three matches it alternates ON-OFF-ON and OFF-ON-OFF. You'll have to figure out what sequence it needs to gain a full match-3 set by combining them with ones off to the side. OR ignoring them entirely.

Later levels start to include chain-colour blockers. If you grab a match-3 of RED tumblestones, you can't do so again until you grab a set of any other colour. At this point the levels start to get rather full and knowing what colour set to grab first took me a few tries. Admittedly I had to brute-force some of them to succeed.

Around this point you'll also have combinations of previous modifiers. Phase block and chain block levels really upp the difficulty level. I had to take a break as I was getting frustrated. Most times I could come back and ace it but there were a few that my mind really struggled with.

If you're not interested in a campaign of set levels you can jump into the Arcade mode.

Here you have a randomly created level to pass and can add any modifier you've unlocked in the main campaign so far. It's nice to be able to go back and practise techniques without replaying the same level over-and-over in the campaign and rote learning it.

This does mean that you have to play through the campaign though to unlock the various modes to play as.

MP Mode allows you to play against up to three other players. I added them in as bots and had a fair amount of fun with it. Along with modifiers you can select bot difficulty and access a few different game modes.

Tug-Of-War sets you up with tumblestones to clear in various sets. You can push/pull sets by clearing them from your screen, forcing players to lose if they can't keep up. It is frantic and fast, and I honestly enjoyed it. Placing all the bots on the highest difficulty and finding a game modifier to win at was a challenge, but doable, even if you play slowly like myself.

Unless you're a real pro at this genre, going fast you will make mistakes. Just going a little bite more carefully and slower can give you the advantage needed.

Battle uses a initial preset chain of tumblestones and from what I can tell becomes somewhat more random afterwards. Failing a match three pushes your screen down 1 layer. If it makes it to the base, you lose.

What I found annoying was that you can get to a point of only having a few blocks and not enough to combine them. You have to take a chance and hit an empty space and see if it matches.

There's also the ability to give out a few free steam keys per day for the MP mode. Anything you've unlocked they can play with.

Overall this is fun. It has the right mix of couch co-op gameplay that can be played online and a large enough campaign and feature set to make it fun solo.

Really recommend if you like the puzzle/match-3 genre and want to play a game that throws a few different things at you.

There are are few noticeable difficulty spikes on some of the campaign maps. If you do get stuck however, remember that these are fixed. You will eventually make it through. And... Someone likely has them all up on youtube by now.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (April 2017).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 14 May 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP SP2+
Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: No dedicated graphics card required
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 1 GB available space