Puzzle Quest on the original DS is one of my favorite games ever and one I've beaten more times than any other RPG I can think of, having completed it once with each of the original four classes over the years. I was super psyched to see that Puzzle Quest had come to Switch, and then sprung on the remake a month or two ago when I saw it was on sale half-off. I didn't realize at the time that this wasn't a direct port of the old DS and PSP game. It isn't even a complete collection of the PS3/360 versions bundled in with the expansion content released for that version of the game as well. This is the original game, the Plague Lord expansion, as well as a heap of more brand new content to make Puzzle Quest feel more different and alive than ever. The Switch doesn't tell you playtime from an easily accessible place, but I'd reckon it took me at least 40 hours to complete all the game's main and side quests on normal difficulty.

The land has been at peace for many centuries, but the sudden appearance of undead lead the headstrong young knight (the main character) on a quest that quickly goes from simple errand running to saving the whole world from the reincarnation of a death god. The story telling is nothing super special, but the main character is way more of a jerk than I remembered them being. There are two endings to the game, but they rely on whether or not you make one specific choice very early in the game, and it's one you probably had no idea could cascade that far down. There are other binary choices you can make in certain side quests (of which there are VERY many), and this version also removes the ability to save-scum like you could in some older versions, so you're stuck with the choices you make. The presentation is pretty typical Western fantasy tropes, but the cast of side characters isn't without its standout fun additions (like Drog, the super hungry Ogre who is always on the hunt for his next meal, be it animals, rocks, or something beyond our plane of existence XD).

The main draw is, as ever, the same thing Puzzle Quest has always had. The meshing of a match-three Bejeweled-style gameplay on top of an RPG game works as well as it always has. You play against an opponent, and the board has four colors of gems you can match for that element of mana, skulls to match to deal damage, stars to match to get EXP, and coins to match for gold. Depending on your character class, you'll learn spells as you level up, and the mana you get in battles can be used to cast those spells (doing everything from board resets, making the enemy lose turns, buffs/debuffs, etc). You have four types of equipment you can equip to give all sorts of passive bonuses (including very important elemental resistances to give possibilities for enemy spells to fizzle). You also have skill points to allocate every level to increase chances for free extra turns, maximum mana pools, wildcard multiplier generation chances, and the rewards of EXP and gold after winning a battle. The game is RNG at its core, but there's a LOT you can do to mess with the game and try and break the systems in ways that fit to how you like to play it.

The main systems aren't without their hiccups though. There's a personal citadel that you can build up with the gold you earn to be able to do things like capture enemy units to learn their spells or use them as mounts (to get their spells). You can also search non-city travel nodes for magic runes that you can use to craft your own equipment at your citadel. However, while the spells are often useful, they're SO hard to learn (it requires getting luckier for longer on a match-3 board, trying to hit certain totals of collected magic) that they're hardly worth putting much time into because the spells you learn normally are usually more thane enough. The same goes for the equipment you can craft yourself, as anything really worthwhile will take you AGES to successfully craft, and the equipment you get from the main quest, side quests, or even the stuff that appears in the shop (from a massive, random pool of items) will be more than enough, not to mention often better, than anything you can craft yourself. A lot of the stuff in the shop is REALLY good as well. There's no way I would've ever beaten the Plague Lord content's final boss if I hadn't stumbled across a magic tome that makes you immune to disease, turning that fight from something nearly impossible to a far fairer fight.

You will get bogged down as you traverse the map fighting really easy monsters at times, who don't take that long to kill but it's still time taken up, but it's possible to skip them by entering and then abandoning the fight, but it depends on the speed of your mount. It's a mechanic so poorly explained it's taken me until this, my 5th playthrough, to realize it's a thing, and it was by such accident that I thought I'd found a glitch on this port instead of a mechanic I'd never realized before.

The additions to the original DS game are twofold: The Plague Lord DLC that was for the old console release, and the entirely new stuff for the Switch version of the game. The Plague Lord DLC is an interesting late-game diversion that is somewhere between pretty par for the course and outright unfair. The disease debuff is REALLY nasty if you don't have a good way to deal with it with your chosen class (as I didn't until I got that particular disease-proofed item). That especially goes for the Plague Lord himself, who is genuinely somewhat of a piss-take with just how absurdly hard he is without that item that makes you immune to disease.

The content added for the Switch version is stated to be the Golem Lord quest line, but it's actually a fair bit more than that. Three major quest lines that are in the beginning-to-middle point of the game have been added, including the Golem Lord, on top of some other miscellaneous additions. These largely consist of giving you more enemy variety (my personal favorite are the giant ants), new mounts, as well as more potential companions to recruit from all the new side quests added. One of the two ending paths through the game takes away a lot of your party members, but going through all the new side content will allow you to get back up to a full roster of 8 followers (who don't actually fight in battle with you. They're just passive buffs that trigger against certain enemies), and that was a really nice addition. It fleshes out the world a bit more, particularly in the area around the beginning of the game, and it's a lot of really quality content. Not all of it is perfect, as the Golem Lord quest line in particular has no level requirements to begin it, meaning that you can start fighting opponents who are WAY too strong for you very close to the beginning of the game. Hardly a cardinal sin, but something that could easily discourage a newer player, and given how well paced and power-gated the rest of the game's content is, it's really weird that it's so poorly done in this one instance.

The presentation is all around just fine. The art has a nice hand-drawn style to it, even if the characters/enemies who were added in the expansions, particularly the stuff made for the Switch port, are REALLY obvious to pick out, as their art style is clearly different from the original's, but it still all fits the same general aesthetic well. The music is fine, but I had a podcast on for most of the game, as you can only listen to the same few tracks so many times before it gets a bit dull in a game this long. The performance is fine, although the game does have loading hiccups during battle from now and then, and one time the game did soft-crash on me just as a fight ended (but it did save that I'd beaten the fight, so all I lost was the time it took me to hop back into the game).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's still Puzzle Quest as good as it ever was. If you didn't like it before, this is absolutely not going to win you over, but if you want a good, low-stress time waster that's really easy to hop in and out of on your Switch, you're gonna get a lot of mileage out of your $15 if you go with Puzzle Quest.