The Forgotten Land

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle / Puzzle (Misc.)

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hero Collection 3 in 1, along with Super Dungeon Maker and Tobla – Divine Path. It is also included in Legends Collection 6-in-1, along with all the above named games plus Castaway Paradise, Harvest Life, and Stranded Sails – Explorers of the Cursed Islands.)

The Forgotten Land is a Puzzle game released in 2020 on PC and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players nominally control a team of adventurers searching for the titular Forgotten Land, fighting monsters and searching for answers through the form of solving various types of puzzles, particularly Bejeweled-style Match-3 Puzzles.

That’s not all though. The Forgotten Land actually bounced between multiple puzzle types. You’ll have Concentration-style card-matching puzzles, simple puzzles requiring you to select pairs of like objects, a basic version of the Bejeweled-style Match-3 Puzzle, and a Puzzle Quest-style take on the Match-3 Puzzle where you alternate turns against opposing monsters using the matches you make to fuel special moves and damage opponents.

These puzzles all largely work (well, except the object-matching puzzles, those are brainless and pointless), and are entertaining enough in small doses, but the lack of focus here really hurts the game. When you start a new puzzle, the game seemingly assigns you one at random, with little to tie the different puzzle types together, and with some being far more involved than others. You could be done with the object-matching puzzle in under a minute, while the battle-style puzzles can take far, far more than that.

It’s not just inconsistent and uneven gameplay and challenge that this lack of focus causes. It also robs this game’s puzzles of the potential depth they could have had. The strongest type of puzzles here, and the closest to a primary type that the game has, are the aforementioned battles. However, compared to Puzzle Quest, your control over these is minimal. You can’t outfit your character or team to customize your loadout like you can in Puzzle Quest and Gems of War, and while there is a “management” element to the game that basically involves spending in-game currency to unlock permanent stat upgrades, it’s nowhere near as deep as what’s present in Puzzle Quest.

The visuals here are at least decent, presenting players with largely decent static 2D visuals. However, this game makes the unusual choice not to have music playing during gameplay, instead backing the gameplay with environmental sounds.

I suppose the argument could be made that The Forgotten Land provides players with variety that Puzzle Quest lacks, but none of that variety is especially compelling. And in exchange, what’s lost is all the depth that Puzzle Quest has to offer. And with The Forgotten Land selling at the same $15 price that Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition is selling for (and with Gems of War being free-to-play), it’s hard for me to recommend this game when you can get a similar, much better game at the same price.

tl;dr – The Forgotten Land is a Puzzle game that combines multiple puzzle types, but primarily Match-3 puzzles similar to Bejeweled or more prominently Puzzle Quest. Unfortunately, in splitting the focus between multiple puzzle types, The Forgotten Land lacks the wonderful depth of Puzzle Quest, and since both are the same price it’s difficult to recommend this game when you could get another superior alternative instead.

Grade: C

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