There’s been a trend for a while where familiar puzzle game genres are imbued with novel stories to give them depth and meaning beyond simply clearing a screen for points. Occult object sorter Strange Horticulture and historical romance card game Regency Solitaire are lovely examples, and now here’s Mythmatch, a match-three game in the style of Candy Crush or Bejeweled that’s also a warming tale of friendship and community set in a small town in ancient Greece. Interspersed with cerebral challenges are dialogue scenes with villagers and with gods which accentuate each other and give little clues that are picked up later, making this both puzzle game and communal oral drama.
You play as Artemis, the immortal daughter of Zeus, who is tired of getting overlooked for plum jobs in favour of her oafish brother Apollo (brilliantly portrayed as an insufferable proto-tech bro). When the role of God of the Hunt comes up, she applies, but finds she must first earn favour with a council of her elders on Mount Olympus, and they all have puzzle-based jobs for her. Hephaestus wants her to help make arrows and hammers in his foundry, while Apollo needs her to protect his collection of chimp soft toys (a not-so-subtle dig at NFTs). These mini-tasks take the form of match-three puzzles, though cleverly they also bring in elements of other puzzle games such as Plants vs Zombies and Overcooked.
But before she can land the role, Artemis gets cast out of Olympus and sent down to the mortal town of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, who has taken all the men and disappeared for years, leaving the women and children to fend for themselves. Here, the game becomes a little rural life sim, where you help the locals by constructing new buildings for them, assisting their trade with other settlements and solving their complicated lives. Brilliantly, this is still mostly done through matching three things. Every item you find in the world can be set down with two other identical items to make something new: match three shells and you get a pearl, match three twigs and you get a wooden plank. Every item you create this way can also be matched again, so you end up with an evolving hierarchy of objects that can be used to build new stuff and help villagers when they come to you with their needs and problems.
This becomes the cycle of the game: you spend your days on Earth becoming a more useful deity, and then at night, you can return to Olympus to try to better your score at the challenges set by the gods. As you become indispensable in the lives of the mortals, they reward you with belief – ecclesiastical XP (experience points), which you can spend to make the Olympian puzzle tasks easier. This structure is brilliantly conceived, encapsulating both the pleasant busywork of a farm sim and the compulsive mental challenge of the match-three puzzler.
The visual style is gentle and cartoonish without being overly cute, and the characters you meet are well-drawn and sympathetic, their stories combining ancient Greek myths with everyday relatable issues and timeless sociopolitical themes. There is unrequited love, there is social anxiety, but there are also underlying themes dealing with everything from absent fathers, to corporate greed, to the philosophy of leadership and the transactional nature of worship.
Mythmatch is also extremely funny. Combining three beetles creates a raccoon, which will then go through the villagers’ refuse sacks generating plastic that you can match into various toys and other useful items. When they’re done scavenging these adorable critters fall asleep, and you often pass them as you wander about town, lying bloated, well-fed, and surrounded by rubbish.
I started playing one afternoon and didn’t stop for nine hours. The interlocking systems, the pleasing pace, the ebb and flow between Olympus and the mortal realm are almost hypnotic. Every time you reach the end of a day cycle you think “just one day more”, and then it’s two in the morning and you’re still trying to grow a pumpkin for the upcoming festival of Demeter, or setting a trap for a monster in the forest. Expertly and lovingly crafted, Mythmatch is a lyrical poem about beautiful and rewarding game design.
