Thank you Denda Games for sending us this game to review!

Gems of Magic: Father’s Day is a match-3 puzzle game available on the Nintendo Switch. It’s similar in style to games like Candy Crush or Pokemon Shuffle. As such, it’s meant to be a casual game played in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or in line to the grocery store checkout.

There’s a short cutscene at the beginning, and it sets the stage for the theme of the game: camping, and of course, Father’s Day. The “gems” in the title are the tiles that the player has to match. The game starts out with having about four different gems that can be matched, but at around level seven, that number is bumped up to five. If the player has trouble finding a match, the game will direct them to one (but it won’t be very good). If there are no matches, the playing area will automatically shuffle all of the gems so that there will be some moves that the player can make.

The user earns coins as the game progresses, and they can use them to spend on power ups. These are only earnable through progress in the game. The player cannot buy coins to help them out. However, when I tried buying some, I couldn’t figure out how to use them. It’s a one time use for power ups as well, and I failed the level, so I don’t have the coins to go back and try again with more power ups.

The first few levels are fairly easy, but they increase exponentially in difficulty as the player continues. There are 100 levels for a user to try their hand at beating, but I wasn’t able to get past level seven. It isn’t the match-3 mechanic that’s difficult, though. The developers have made sure that matching is always fairly easy. It’s what the player has to achieve within a certain number of moves that makes this particular game hard to beat. For example, in level seven (the one I couldn’t pass), the player has to get rid of 40 squares with rocks and sand, which they do by matching on top of them, and also get the father icon from the bottom of the screen to the top, which is done by performing a match directly above. They only had 38 moves to do so. It is beatable. I’ve seen my father try and get very close (but he accidentally closed out of the level). It is just very difficult, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to beat it.

For everything (except the power ups), the game tells the player how to perform a particular function. It will say in the menu which button does what thing (e.g. A to return to the game in the pause menu, and B to exit it. It’s a little wonky, but at least it tells the user how to do it. This is why my dad was unable to beat level seven).

The graphics are simple, but pleasant. It’s a match-3, it doesn’t need super complex or particularly grandiose visuals. The cutscene at the beginning looked alright, and the menu screen features 3D characters that look nice but have some minor flaws (that only an artist like myself would notice, probably). The music is simple and acoustic, and really helped with keeping my patience flowing.

Morally, there’s nothing wrong with this game. It’s a match-3, there’s nothing to get wrong.

Overall, Gems of Magic: Father’s Day is yet another match-3 game available to pass the time. It doesn’t do too much to be revolutionary, but it does happen to pose a nice challenge for whoever decides that a game like Candy Crush is too easy for them.

- Kittycathead