Spooky Dwellers 3

IKIGames makes some of the most underrated M3 games out there; I've always found it surprising that they don't get more attention. The newest Spooky Dwellers features the skeletal ghost writer (no, really, he's an author) Thomassino, who would like your help in figuring out why a certain house is filled with ghosts and to re-house them in a better place. (Maybe he's secretly territorial and wants the house for himself? I dunno, but love that pink wig he's rocking.) There are 90 levels in the first map and 60 in the second (CE) map. Your goal is to remove all the ghosts and any colored tiles in the playfield. Usually, the ghosts are hanging out on the edges and you must aim the light beams by removing obstacles and positioning other gadgets to get the lights to shine on the ghosts to scare them off. The CE map begins featuring creepy critters who are inside the playfield and must be matched next to enough times. New features to this game are fog, some of which reappears after a certain amount of moves, along with spider web obstacles which must be burned strategically, and chained pieces (which oddly will block light beams, while fog does not). There are quite a few minigame types which appear every so often between levels in the first map and more in the CE extras: HOS, jigsaw puzzle variant where you rotate the sections into place, mazes, a "click on the sequence" game, and a bounce-to-hit game where you aim objects to collect coins. The mazes were my favorite and I hope there will be more in future IKIGames releases. The other CE extras are some wallpapers and character stories courtesy of our hero ghost writer. Thomassino wants you to build a Playground for the evicted ghosts to live in, but IMO the Playground scene building in this game is a step backwards from the wonderful sim-game side project Spooky Dwellers 2 featured. If you have a lot of patience where you're willing to play through nearly the whole game to fulfill all the Playground goals, you can get a really good looking scene built - and the Playground expands about 30% bigger when the CE levels unlock. But if you simply want to get all the ghosts re-housed and the achievements associated with the Playground ASAP, you're stuck with building a really ugly scene, albeit you will get all the goals done with the Playground rapidly (I've done it by the halfway mark of the first map). The overall difficulty has been stepped up a little bit with each installment of this series, and this one is no exception. There are levels which can be rendered impossible if you do things in the wrong order, and that red fog can be rather maddening. The game is still plenty doable if you play in relaxed or normal modes, and there are lots of customization options in the game to tweak the difficulty more subtly such as being able to generate powerups with bigger matches or not and having powerups break obstacles or not. But beware of that new "expert" mode. It pulls no punches whatsoever and is a real nightmare to get through! I accuse a certain beta tester of completely breaking that mode, sorry... Otherwise, an interesting and different M3.