Sometimes, you just can’t beat the classics. That at least seems to be the philosophy behind Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, the latest release of a nearly two-decade-old puzzle game that doesn’t change much, but doesn’t really need to, either.
Put simply, Puzzle Quest is a match-3 game mixed with an RPG. It plays exactly as you’d expect any match-3 game to, asking you to line up three gems of the same color to remove them from a puzzle board, as you would in games like Candy Crush. The difference is that rather than scoring points for each match, you either gain mana, deal damage to an opponent, or gain gold and experience points. Its RPG side comes from the fact that its puzzles are actually all battles that pit you against an opponent who competes against you on every board, and from its fantasy adventure storyline.
But really, you won’t be playing Puzzle Quest for the story. It’s standard RPG fare, so by-the-numbers that its predictability actually becomes sort of charming. The same goes for its soundtrack and art style (touched up in 4K for the Immortal Edition), which are comfortingly anonymous in their own way.
What you will be playing for is the captivating twist it brings to gem-matching puzzles. The simple conceit of using gem matches to power spells feels timeless, and the 2025 edition of the game is just as compelling as the original 2007 release for that reason. In each battle, you take turns with your opponent making matches. Matching skulls deals damage, while matching gems fills mana pools of four different colors. Each character and enemy has its own set of spells, which draw from specific colored mana pools to cast. That means that your strategy can vary greatly depending on which enemy you’re facing, keeping the match-3 puzzles from getting stale even over the dozens of hours the game takes to complete.
Between battles, Puzzle Quest mostly plays out on a large world map, which you’ll travel across in the course of its story. Quests dot the map in important locations and patrolling monsters pose even more challenges on the road. Completing quests and defeating foes can reward you with equipment as well as experience points, giving bonuses to certain spell types or increasing your power with certain types of attacks. All of this is again totally standard for RPGs, but just the fact that it’s all molded into the shape of a match-3 puzzle makes it feel entirely new.
At the outset of your quest, you’ll choose a character class from a huge list of options, which determines your starting spells and skills. The most straightforward of them just do damage and destroy certain types of gems, but more advanced classes manipulate the gems on the puzzle board to favor your chosen mana type or even siphon mana from enemies. One of the few brand-new features in the Immortal Edition is a new class, the Warlock, which uses mana draining effects. Along with that new class, it also includes all of the original game’s DLC, which add new quests, as well as more equipment to enable more tweaks to your strategy.
Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition might disappoint long-time fans of the original game who wanted something more substantially new, but for anyone else, it’s extremely easy to recommend. The Puzzle Quest series continued with greatly diminishing returns after the first game, eventually morphing into a free-to-play mobile series that loses almost everything that makes the original great. If you already own Puzzle Quest, the new content in Immortal Edition may not be enough to justify picking it up, but anyone who hasn’t yet played the best melding of match-3 games and RPGs ever will find a lot to love here.
