Cursed House 5

Cursed House is my favorite Match three series!

This is one of my favorites in the Cursed House series, even if the cursed house scene looks kind of tacky. 115 levels of M3-puzzle fusion, and a lot of minigames, mostly solitaire, but several spot the difference scenes and HOS. The difficulty of the puzzles is a bit scattered, but overall the puzzles have more polish than CH3 and CH4, which were the first games of the series to use the M3-puzzle concept. Some levels are pretty easy, but others are sneaky where you need to plan a few moves ahead. There is still a fair bit of what looks like playing half the level and then it will finish playing itself, but a decent amount of challenge without being excessively frustrating. Morphing powerups and small bombs to help you out, and an instant hint given to you if you're taking a while. I wish the hints could've been turned off as they seem to pop up relatively quickly, and I'm not a slow M3 player. You have to use the powerups no matter how good a player you are. I've commented on this elsewhere, and the developer has made some of the newer games with less reliance on powerups, but this Cursed House is a powerup fest. The house restoration scene has gone back to what Cursed House 1 and 3 did, where you start out with the demon-infested house and the Amulet gradually removes the curse. It makes more sense than the rebuilding of a messed up house CH4 had. I do miss the red fire bugs still, and the extra challenging bonus levels from the previous installment. Having a bunch of minigames instead this time around was a step back IMO because the solitaire games are too easy. It does get better in later games as the challenge level was upped with the minigames.