Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3

Play this game. I don't care if you love or hate match-3, or branching paths, or whatever-the-♥♥♥♥-else. If the name put you off? Play it. Avoided it because it looked like a Resident Evil spoof? Play it. Seriously, this has been an enjoyable experience and I intend to find most of everything I missed, I simply felt the NEED, the actual NEED, to alt-tab and write this review after hitting the end of the game. People need to play this, to see this. It's not that hard - but the difficulty isn't why it's enjoyable. It's the narrative. For your own sake; play this game.

You have to be in the mood for this kind of game. The "gameplay" is a mashup of Visual Novel and a well-designed Match-3 which breaks up the walls of text you'll read. The story is absurd, the music is phenomenal, sound design appropriate, and visuals acceptable. I personally loved my time with this game, but you definitely have to be in the mood for an absurdist commentary on video gaming as a whole, with a pleasant match-3 game thrown in for funsies. Gaining 'traits' to progress the story really tickled my lizard brain but I wish the game held your hand a little better if you were trying to 100% it (some parts are at dead ends you have already completed. either take notes or be prepared to go through everything again. At least there's a fast forward option for the text! And auto-complete for some of the battles)

Ridiculously good, I had no idea how badly I needed a game like this. I knew it'd be funny, and it is constantly, but it also made me emotional for the state of the games industry and lost art everywhere. Wonder if you're secretly racist to the mothman one minute, eat your own clone the next. If you're put off by the match 3 elements, don't be, this game has opened my eyes to all the story telling mechanically possible in a puzzle like this that couldn't be done in a regular rpg. 10/10 would hug it out with filbert again

I've been picking away at Creep Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 for a little while now and finally finished it on Saturday. It's a goofy match-3 game wrapped inside of a comedic visual novel that is filled with jokes about video game development and has multiple branching paths that can only be accessed after taking care of things elsewhere. On the surface, it does seem like just another one of these in the wake of Puzzle Quest releasing two decades ago, but this really is its own thing that is worth playing. If you've ever played a video game on a console, PC, or phone in the wake of Bejeweled's success, you have played this style of puzzle game. It's what your mother-in-law is obsessed with. You swap two adjacent pieces on the board to try and make a row or column of at least three of the same pieces to remove them from the board. Similar to Puzzle Quest's take on the genre, [b]CRDM3[/b] banks the pieces you remove and once you have enough, you have the opportunity to use a special action, such as an attack or heal, because you are facing an opponent who is also making matches on the same board. Do enough damage to the opponent (or occasionally a different goal that's functionally the same) and you win. Simple to understand, simple to play, and fairly addictive at times. [b]CRDM3[/b] doesn't feel like the usual cheap and quick game in this genre though. This is a fully-featured game with effort, passion, and joy put into every bit. The story here is based around video game tropes, specifically those of the late 90s survival horror games like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis. It also uses a lot of jokes about the business realities and fandom culture surrounding video games. The characters here know they're in a game and they want to figure out what the deal is with this situation. It's based almost entirely around jokes and goofing around, but it also takes the story seriously, making sure it's a consistent thing. Things from the beginning of the game will pay off in the end of the game. It's not a linear path to the end either. There are branching paths that will bring you to various dead ends or help you gain an ability that will let you bypass previous roadblocks. You get a story map that is vaguely reminiscent of the one from Virtue's Last Reward and dotted along this map, there are bars (a place that serves booze bar) that you can select as your starting point. These bars also let you manage your inventory and purchase upgrades for your character. All of this gives the player a lot of freedom to go about how they want to continue their story at the moment. It's surprisingly deep for something so goofy and when you come across silly little surprises in the branches, it's very rewarding! I thought most of the jokes were pretty good. It's definitely internet humor at times but it's not just meme references or quotes from Reddit. The jokes trust the player that they'll understand them and it doesn't feel the need to walk you through why the joke is funny. I laughed at more of the jokes than not, so that's gotta count for something. Of course, that'll all be subjective, but even if someone hates the jokes, I doubt they would think the jokes are easy and lazy. The game does get pretty meta at some points, which I got a kick out of, but I know that leaves other people cold. The match-3 stuff works well and there is enough variety in the goals for the puzzles that it doesn't get too monotonous, though of course it's still just match-3 stuff, so it'll work best in small doses for most people. I'm a pretty terrible match-3 player, with most of my combos being simply luck. I don't know how much planning can go into the drops, especially when new ones drop from the top that keep the chains going. I'm sure someone with a better understanding of these mechanics could tell you what makes CRDM3's puzzle system work compared to others but regardless of why, I found it fun to play. The match-3 genre is filled with lazy cash-grabs but this isn't one of them. It's probably the best one I've personally played, honestly. I took my time with it because I have to be in the right mood for these kinds of puzzles but I enjoyed it the entire time I played. If you like silly jokes and solid match-3 gameplay, you can't go wrong with this one. It's a really fun time and worthwhile. It seemed like a struggle for this game to get released but I'm glad the people making it knew it was worthwhile and kept pushing forward with it. I hope we get more in this series someday.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is a very goofy Match 3 puzzle battler (a la Puzzle Quest) that's both a send-up of game franchises like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, but also a bit of an inside baseball look at game development (both in general and its own - it's very meta). It's generally a good time - the writing's great, the battles are all unique, and while some of them are relatively challenging, it's a low-stakes affair (you're rarely more than 2 battles from a checkpoint). A lot of the game loop involves exploring areas and doing a Choose Your Own Adventure style narrative to unlock new character traits and progress. You can also backtrack at any point, as some options or branches require you to have character traits you can't earn until later. It does have some technical issues (some crashes on Steam Deck, the progression/unlock tracker seems a bit broken so it's hard to tell if you've actually gotten everything in a chapter or not), but it's nothing that really prevents you from beating the game and seeing everything. Worth a look if you want a ~8-10 hour Match 3 game that's both silly and sincere.

Thanks to a friend who loves to check out the weird and niche kinds of games on this platform, I was allowed to witness CRDM3 and to even play it myself. I 100% completed the game with every ingame dialogue explored. It was such a great time. The music has been stuck with me for days even after finishing the game. An experience like this is why indie will always be better than Triple-A for me.

Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 (CRDM3 en adelante) es un juego especial que mezcla exploración, aventura conversacional y match-3, que empieza poco a poco y de repente salta de cabeza en una historia meta narrativa muy loca. He de ser sincero y decir que de los juegos de Strange Scaffold (Publisher y Dev) este era el que menos me llamaba la atención, quizás por el hecho de parecer un Match-3 normalucho o por la estética simplista. Pero vaya guantá' me he llevado, y con gusto, que conste. He disfrutado cada girito de guión, cada nuevo personaje o conversación rocambolesca. CRDM3 es un juego totalmente recomendable que te va a dejar con ganas de más.

While the title of the game had me intrigued, I didn't think the match-3 gameplay would be for me. However I was [i]very wrong[/i]. This game is an absolute masterpiece! Especially recommended for anyone working in gamedev, parts of the story will hit you right in the feels. Be prepared.

Unique match 3 puzzle game with a story that is a mixture of comedy and existential horror, a well written condemnation of the game industry and celebration of creation built around terrible simplistic dull timewasting mechanics. The map exploration elements add a lot of potential paths and new ways to go when you unlock certain traits but it makes it difficult to find the areas you have missed. It might show a path where you haven't reached a dead end yet but you'll have to remember where was it that I might be able to get that trait or which spot needed a certain trait or amount of health to get through. To find these areas you are going to have to spawn at certain spots, skip through repeated dialogue scenes until you either know you are on the right path or hopefully know that you can hit enter at any point to click the option to back out and go to the rest hub to look at the map and try to find the right spot again. Even knowing that you need to go back to a certain path might lead you to having to guess which of three choices takes you on the right path, backing out and going back every time you get the choice wrong. The biggest problem with the game is that the puzzle gameplay is just terrible, often doing little but wasting your time and never acting as a challenge until near the end of the game. You match three or more of the same symbol which allows you to collect those symbols to power abilities, certain challenges will change up additional types of symbols for abilities made for that challenge or knife symbols for combat encounters. Some encounters just require you to match symbols or perform actions to gain progress. After your turn your opponent goes and tries to damage you or reduce your progress. The constant changes in how the activity is presented and the unique ability names and actions in some encounters is funny or interesting in theory but it is such an easy and simplistic activity that lacks in any real growth or build options that most of these encounters got a little chuckle from the set up followed by disappointment that I now had to waste time getting through it. Certain traits can give you a new ability but this is fairly rare and often uninteresting, you gain some currency to spend on upgrading your health, stress, and item slots. Stress could have been an interesting feature but when filled just has you spin a wheel for some very underwhelming results, with some of those results including nothing happens. Some of these encounters are near impossible to lose with you just filling a progress bar and even the enemies that damage you don't matter much as almost every single one of these puzzle moments is followed by giving you all of your health back anyway so there is almost never any threat to taking damage or stress. A lot of people think of Puzzle Quest when they get a match 3 with some RPG elements but there is no build to make or interesting skills to work towards and even though encounters might write the names of abilities differently they rarely do much to change up how you are interacting with the puzzle, for most you barely even need to be paying attention. Certainly a unique style to it and going through the story was enjoyable enough but it is built around dull overly simplistic often time wasting gameplay that takes up even more of your time when you try to find the content you haven't seen yet on the mostly unhelpful map. I can forgive a lot or ignore things I don't like for good or entertaining writing but the really good moments are to few to be worth playing through the game. Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3mp654rib6224

This game shouldn't exist, but it does exist and I'm glad it exists because it needs to exist.