Spellarium 11

The latest Spellarium features 90 M3-puzzle fusion levels in which the goal is the obtain all the coins. Some of the coins will move with swaps now, but you don't always have to swap them to obtain them, which is part of the puzzle with many levels. In between M3 levels, you are reconstructing a town scene to make all the assorted elemental spirits happy so as to restore the sun to a dying world. The Dark Elements which were in many games are missing this time around...maybe it's counterproductive to have dark spirits at work if you're trying to bring the sun back? This one's hard, even for Spellarium, where previous games have sometimes been challenging and others easier similar to Laruaville. Some levels can be rendered impossible or nearly impossible to finish if you do things in the wrong order, and there's no "replay" button flashing if you've hopelessly messed it up. I actually intentionally tried messing things up in certain levels just to see what would happen, and the only thing is you'll be stuck until you think to go to the menu button and restart the level from there. While the slightly cartoonish graphics of the town scenes hasn't quite been my thing in any of these games, I actually enjoyed building the scene in this game and it's one of my favorite Spellarium scenes. Some of the items I can't help but chuckle at. As usual, there are tons of minigames to play. With there being a total of 48 minigames, it's a good third of the overall content! The solitaire games were made really easy this time around, even easier than they usually are. Spot the difference is charming and the usual difficulty. The mahjong games have had their layouts made more challenging to where you need to consider your moves carefully and think a move or 2 ahead to not get stuck, which I appreciate. The jigsaw puzzles with their quirky piece shapes were sneaky despite there not being all that many pieces (and the buildings/trees in them aren't necessarily in the orientation you'd think). But I still found having this many minigames, even if you can skip them and play them later, excessive for a 90 level game. The solitaire could have been taken out completely as these super predictable child's games did nothing for a puzzle game. Otherwise, an enjoyable experience and I'm as usual impressed with how the developer always finds something new to put into each game, which is no easy feat considering how many of these games and series they have.