Fans of the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time be glad, for there is finally a match-three mobile game with Adventure Time characters. It’s called Adventure Time Puzzle Quest, and like Marvel Puzzle Quest it combines jewel-matching with leveling up characters and RPG-style fighting.
It’s free-to-play and available on iOS, Android, and the Amazon Appstore. It’s made by D3 Go!, the company responsible for the Adventure Time Card Wars, a digital card game based on the Card Wars episode of Adventure Time.
Card Wars is a great little game for fans of the series because it takes a one-off gag and turns it into a fully fleshed-out game. Puzzle Quest is, well, a skin of a skin. It’s not exactly original.
I don’t want to rag on it too hard. It looks good, but essentially it’s Marvel Puzzle Quest and the rest of the Puzzle Quest games with some Adventure Time facepaint slapped on it. That’s not terrible. But as much as it tries, it can’t capture the whimsy and charm that make Adventure Time a good show in the first place.
The Adventure Time TV show is delightfully surreal and complex—in a “wow, what a wild ride” kinda way. That’s not something you want in your game’s user interface. There are lots of little things to do in Adventure Time Puzzle Quest, including crafting, buying wishes, and going on quests. You’re fighting rats, you’re recruiting beloved characters to your team…It’s a lot, but there’s no point at which the game’s text really grabs you and makes you want to care about the plot. This is a problem in a mobile game that’s so heavily laden with menus.
So yes, I’m disappointed. It would be nice to play an Adventure Time game that makes me laugh like the show does, and one that kept my interest for more than ten minutes or so.
Adventure Time Puzzle Quest is free though, so if you’re a fan of games like this it doesn’t hurt to try it out. Unfortunately for Adventure Time Puzzle Quest, I suspect that by the time most players hit a pay wall they will have lost interest.
