If you like match 3 games, RPGs, you want a game that’s easy to pick up and play, and doesn’t demand a lot from you, there’s very few games that are better than Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition. The devs deserve the support, especially because Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition could be chock-full of micro-transactions and it isn’t. That should be applauded and supported. I can save you some time and tell you to just buy the game if you want to stop reading right here. It’s worth your money. Go buy it.
Let me start out and say that Puzzle Question: Immortal Edition is probably the best value in gaming right now. It’s $15 without a sale, and is currently on sale for $11.99 on Steam and Nintendo’s eShop as of this review. My understanding is that price lasts until the beginning of October, so take advantage of it if you’re interested.
So if that’s enough information for you, you can skip the rest of the review and I’ll just say thanks for coming to SmashPad. We appreciate the support. If you want to know what Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition is, why it’s worth your money, what the difference is with this version and the other versions released before, then please read on.
The original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is one of those games I’ve been playing for almost 20 years. I played the original when it came out in 2007 and I’ve played every iteration of it that I could get my hands on. I played Puzzle Quest 2, I played Puzzle Quest Galactrix, I played Marvel’s Puzzle Quest, I played weird versions of almost-Puzzle-Quests like Gems of War. None of them were as good as the original, and all of them had compromises that just made the experience either sub-par, or flat out worse due to the monetary models attached to them. When I heard the original Puzzle Quest was getting remaster, it pretty much shot to the top of my anticipated games for 2025 list. And you all know 2025 is STACKED. All that is to say, I was very intrigued. So much so that I volunteered to review Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, despite the fact that I stopped writing reviews years ago.
It’s very easy to go into “This is the game, these are the graphics, this is how the game sounds, blah blah blah”. I’m not going to do that. The reason I’m reviewing this is because Puzzle Quest is such a weird amalgamation of things that shouldn’t work when put together (an RPG with a match 3 battle system) but they absolutely work, even after all these years.
So what is Puzzle Quest? As I mentioned above, it’s an RPG, a basic one, with a match-3 battle system instead of a turn-based or real-time battle system. It has traditional RPG classes such as Paladin, Warlock, Bard, etc., and your character walks from place to place, gathering quests and getting into battles. Enemies can appear on the map between destinations, to act as typical random battles you’d find in a more traditional RPGs. Over the course of the game you will level up, buy weapons and armor, upgrade your stats, get new skills, siege towns, build a base, and gather party members. All the traditional RPG trappings, but again, with a match-3 battle system.
Since the core battle system is a match-3 game, and you will be doing a LOT of battles, it’s helpful to understand how the battles work even if you know how match 3 games work, because there is a class system involved. When you get into a battle, you will be presented with a board full of gems of various colors, gold coins, purple stars, and skulls.
The colors represent a specific type of mana, green, red, yellow and blue, and you get mana of that specific color by matching 3 or more of the same gem color. The mana gained from matching gems is tied to elements. Green is earth mastery, Red is fire mastery, yellow and blue are air and water mastery. Your character has spells and attacks that use those specific mana types so it’s important to match gems to power your spells so you can attack the enemy.
Even if you don’t have enough mana to cast a spell, you can still do damage directly by matching skull gems on the board. There’s also gold pieces on the board that can be matched and give you currency that can be used in town shops to buy armor, weapons and accessories. The last gem type on the board is a purple star, which provides XP when matched. This is very useful if you need to grind levels, allowing you to get a few extra turns and match experience gems before landing your killing blow, making the match more beneficial to you overall.
Lucky match (matching 4 of the same kind of gem instead of 3) gives a bonus move and a 50% chance to create a wild card. Wild cards can match with any gem, and are very powerful. There’s also things like +5 skulls that will show up on the board to grant even more damage when matched. One of the big changes in this version is that T shaped matches and L shaped matches count towards a +4 or +5 match, which is a welcome change and provides more options for matches.
Earlier I mentioned a class system, and this is where Puzzle Quest gets really fun. The gem color matches give you mana for that specific color. As your character levels up, you will gain spells that require a specific amount of colored mana to cast. As you gain more levels and more spells, you can build robust strategies around what gems you should match so you can cast specific spells to either attack your enemy, cast debilitating spells on them, buff yourself, etc. Just like you would in a traditional RPG. Keep in mind, the enemy can do this to you as well.
The colored mana needed for spells, combined with the fact that you’re playing against an opponent who is matching gems so they can cast spells to kill you, provides an overall strategy and gameplay canvas that’s different than your average match-3 game. This core gameplay loop is what has made Puzzle Quest so compelling and the game play loop plays out to dramatic effect as you level your character and get into more and more encounters. Depending on your type of character class that’s chosen, you may find that you want to focus on a very specific set of gems to power your spells. Skulls on the board also provide plenty of options to deal damage if you are mana starved.
You can also build up resistances based on your class, armor and weapons. Your enemies have these kinds of resistances and weaknesses as well so you can go into a fight against an enemy that has a weakness against air spells and absolutely destroy them if your character class specializes in air magic. Conversely, you can go into a fight that is severely tilted in the enemy’s favor because you lack certain resistances or don’t have the right type of armor equipped. That exact scenario was actually a big problem in the original Puzzle Quest because as you got further into the game, you would encounter enemies that seem to be tailored to hit your weak points, while having no weak points of their own and having a lot of resistances available. This created situations in the original game that felt like the computer was cheating, the same way that current match three games that are free to play seem like they starve you of moves just so that you’ll pay for additional currency. The original Puzzle Quest was doing that before any of these pay-to-win games you find on mobile devices. The only difference between Puzzle Question and those games was in Puzzle Quest you had no way to win the fight, relying on pure luck, or, in typical RPG fashion, grinding like crazy just so you could be over leveled to beat the enemy.
One of the fun elements of this type of battle system is the strategy that you can create. When you begin battle, you can see the spells that you have available and you can also see the spells that your opponent has. So if you see that your opponent has a spell that costs six blue mana and six red mana, you can go out of your way to match blue mana gems and red mana gems to starve the enemy of the resources they need to cast their spell. Conversely, they can do the same to you. This creates a fun push and pull dynamic that is at the core of what makes Puzzle Quest work really well and differentiates it from your typical match three game, before you even consider that this has so many of the usual RPG trappings tied into it.
As I mentioned above, pretty much all of this is the same as what was in the original Puzzle Quest so what’s changed? What makes this game worth it in 2025?
When Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords was released back in 2007 (OH MY GOD 2007?!) it had the original campaign and four classes. In 2008 there was an expansion titled “The Revenge of the Plague Lord” that was released, which added a new quest line to the game, and 4 additional classes. As far as I know, this expansion never made it to the PC and only came to consoles.
In 2019 Puzzle Quest was released on the Nintendo Switch with a bunch of additional content, including new quests, four new classes, new items, new enemies, and new spells.
Now in 2025, we have Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, and it has a GRIP (this is a technical term. It means a LOT) of changes that stand out immediately. First, Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition has all of the previous expansions for Puzzle Quest, and all the assets have been redrawn to be compatible with HD and 4K screens. The gems all have unique shapes as well, which is a big deal from an accessibility standpoint. One of my fellow colleagues here at SmashPad, Filippo Dinolfo, has brought up how important accessibility is across many of his reviews, and the gem change here is one I KNOW he would appreciate. Some folks may find the gems a bit garish because they can have that smoothed “uprez-sheen-look” that pixel graphics can have when someone applies a filter on them to make them compatible with 4K displays, but the good news is you can adjust the Blur setting in the options screen to help mitigate the effect.
In additional to the change to the gem shapes, there are options to set a timeframe for how quickly the game will display a hint on what gems you can match, as well as options for text speed, and battle animations. These updates can make the game move quicker overall if you want it to.
Other changes that I noticed were that your class selection does not change what your portrait looks like. In the past version of Puzzle Quest you were stuck with specific portraits but in Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, you can choose any portrait for any class. So if you like the look of a particular character, you can use it.
Despite all of this, Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition isn’t without its flaws. One thing that hasn’t changed is the game definitely feels like it still cheats. In my fight with the skeleton which happens early on in the game, the enemy got a six match, a five match another five match and a four match all on the second turn. This was after they damaged me , and the additional matches all have wild cards attached to them. This led to the skeleton having over 20 mana points in each mana on turn four. Another fight shortly after that with a bat had me down to 8 health on turn 8 while the vampire bat had 71/86.
When you enter a battle you can select easy, normal, and hard. Easy hits you with a -25% penalty to your XP and your money, but if you want a smoother experience, at least as you are learning the game, I totally recommend taking it. The 25% loss is barely noticeable and it will be worth not feeling like the computer is cheating and throwing you a beating.
Another missed opportunity was with the classes. With so many classes in the game, I do wish the developers had provided more information about the classes and how to play them. The previous releases of Puzzle Quest never properly explained the classes, and the balance/function of the classes hasn’t really been addressed here despite the base gameplay being almost 20 years old. In the late 2000s that may have been acceptable but in 2025, there really should have been SOMETHING done to help ease players into the game with their classes because if you pick the wrong class, one that requires a much higher level to acquire skills and spells to really get rolling, you could find yourself hitting a hard difficulty wall very early in the game.
The game also doesn’t really explain how the base building works, so you can spend money on buildings early in the game when money is relatively scarce and see no benefit from it. The game also doesn’t tell you that shops rotate their stock after every battle, so if you see something you want and don’t have the cash for it, you will probably decide you’re going to grind money for it like you would in other RPG, right? Well, that doesn’t really work in Puzzle Quest because the item you wanted won’t be in the shop the next time you go. Eventually the shops rotate stock so the item you’re looking for will be back, but it will require you go through more battles. This feels archaic in 2025.
The force feedback/rumble on the Switch is obnoxious as well. An option to turn it off would have been welcome.
In my playthrough I encountered achievements popping for the wrong things, after putting points into skills the options screen would pop up instead of going back to the main map, and I also encountered general spelling errors that really should have been fixed. It’s little things like that which make you ask the question “… they really couldn’t have fixed that before release?” But again, this game is $11.99 until the beginning of October. I have no idea what the budget was for this re-release, so I can let a lot of things slide. I’ve encountered far bigger bugs–including game breaking ones–in releases that cost $69.99.
So if you’ve made it this far, you probably want a numerical score and I’m sorry, I can’t give you one. I can’t assign Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition a numerical value because I think those are relative, and an 8 to me might be a 4 to you, or vice versa. What I can say is Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, despite its flaws, is a genuine VALUE. It’s worth FAR more than its asking price, and that’s RARE these days.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I played this on my PC, my OLED Steam Deck, and on my Nintendo Switch. It runs PERFECTLY on all three, 60 FPS (or more depending on your setup), and both the Switch and Steam Deck support touch controls.
If you like match 3 games, RPGs, you want a game that’s easy to pick up and play, and doesn’t demand a lot from you, there’s very few games that are better than Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition. The devs deserve the…
If you like match 3 games, RPGs, you want a game that’s easy to pick up and play, and doesn’t demand a lot from you, there’s very few games that are better than Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition. The devs deserve the support, especially because Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition could be chock-full of micro-transactions and it isn’t. That should be applauded and supported. I can save you some time and tell you to just buy the game if you want to stop reading right here. It’s worth your money. Go buy it.
Let me start out and say that Puzzle Question: Immortal Edition is probably the best value in gaming right now. It’s $15 without a sale, and is currently on sale for $11.99 on Steam and Nintendo’s eShop as of this review. My understanding is that price lasts until the beginning of October, so take advantage of it if you’re interested.
So if that’s enough information for you, you can skip the rest of the review and I’ll just say thanks for coming to SmashPad. We appreciate the support. If you want to know what Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition is, why it’s worth your money, what the difference is with this version and the other versions released before, then please read on.
The original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is one of those games I’ve been playing for almost 20 years. I played the original when it came out in 2007 and I’ve played every iteration of it that I could get my hands on. I played Puzzle Quest 2, I played Puzzle Quest Galactrix, I played Marvel’s Puzzle Quest, I played weird versions of almost-Puzzle-Quests like Gems of War. None of them were as good as the original, and all of them had compromises that just made the experience either sub-par, or flat out worse due to the monetary models attached to them. When I heard the original Puzzle Quest was getting remaster, it pretty much shot to the top of my anticipated games for 2025 list. And you all know 2025 is STACKED. All that is to say, I was very intrigued. So much so that I volunteered to review Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, despite the fact that I stopped writing reviews years ago.
It’s very easy to go into “This is the game, these are the graphics, this is how the game sounds, blah blah blah”. I’m not going to do that. The reason I’m reviewing this is because Puzzle Quest is such a weird amalgamation of things that shouldn’t work when put together (an RPG with a match 3 battle system) but they absolutely work, even after all these years.
So what is Puzzle Quest? As I mentioned above, it’s an RPG, a basic one, with a match-3 battle system instead of a turn-based or real-time battle system. It has traditional RPG classes such as Paladin, Warlock, Bard, etc., and your character walks from place to place, gathering quests and getting into battles. Enemies can appear on the map between destinations, to act as typical random battles you’d find in a more traditional RPGs. Over the course of the game you will level up, buy weapons and armor, upgrade your stats, get new skills, siege towns, build a base, and gather party members. All the traditional RPG trappings, but again, with a match-3 battle system.
Since the core battle system is a match-3 game, and you will be doing a LOT of battles, it’s helpful to understand how the battles work even if you know how match 3 games work, because there is a class system involved. When you get into a battle, you will be presented with a board full of gems of various colors, gold coins, purple stars, and skulls.
The colors represent a specific type of mana, green, red, yellow and blue, and you get mana of that specific color by matching 3 or more of the same gem color. The mana gained from matching gems is tied to elements. Green is earth mastery, Red is fire mastery, yellow and blue are air and water mastery. Your character has spells and attacks that use those specific mana types so it’s important to match gems to power your spells so you can attack the enemy.
Even if you don’t have enough mana to cast a spell, you can still do damage directly by matching skull gems on the board. There’s also gold pieces on the board that can be matched and give you currency that can be used in town shops to buy armor, weapons and accessories. The last gem type on the board is a purple star, which provides XP when matched. This is very useful if you need to grind levels, allowing you to get a few extra turns and match experience gems before landing your killing blow, making the match more beneficial to you overall.
Lucky match (matching 4 of the same kind of gem instead of 3) gives a bonus move and a 50% chance to create a wild card. Wild cards can match with any gem, and are very powerful. There’s also things like +5 skulls that will show up on the board to grant even more damage when matched. One of the big changes in this version is that T shaped matches and L shaped matches count towards a +4 or +5 match, which is a welcome change and provides more options for matches.
Earlier I mentioned a class system, and this is where Puzzle Quest gets really fun. The gem color matches give you mana for that specific color. As your character levels up, you will gain spells that require a specific amount of colored mana to cast. As you gain more levels and more spells, you can build robust strategies around what gems you should match so you can cast specific spells to either attack your enemy, cast debilitating spells on them, buff yourself, etc. Just like you would in a traditional RPG. Keep in mind, the enemy can do this to you as well.
The colored mana needed for spells, combined with the fact that you’re playing against an opponent who is matching gems so they can cast spells to kill you, provides an overall strategy and gameplay canvas that’s different than your average match-3 game. This core gameplay loop is what has made Puzzle Quest so compelling and the game play loop plays out to dramatic effect as you level your character and get into more and more encounters. Depending on your type of character class that’s chosen, you may find that you want to focus on a very specific set of gems to power your spells. Skulls on the board also provide plenty of options to deal damage if you are mana starved.
You can also build up resistances based on your class, armor and weapons. Your enemies have these kinds of resistances and weaknesses as well so you can go into a fight against an enemy that has a weakness against air spells and absolutely destroy them if your character class specializes in air magic. Conversely, you can go into a fight that is severely tilted in the enemy’s favor because you lack certain resistances or don’t have the right type of armor equipped. That exact scenario was actually a big problem in the original Puzzle Quest because as you got further into the game, you would encounter enemies that seem to be tailored to hit your weak points, while having no weak points of their own and having a lot of resistances available. This created situations in the original game that felt like the computer was cheating, the same way that current match three games that are free to play seem like they starve you of moves just so that you’ll pay for additional currency. The original Puzzle Quest was doing that before any of these pay-to-win games you find on mobile devices. The only difference between Puzzle Question and those games was in Puzzle Quest you had no way to win the fight, relying on pure luck, or, in typical RPG fashion, grinding like crazy just so you could be over leveled to beat the enemy.
One of the fun elements of this type of battle system is the strategy that you can create. When you begin battle, you can see the spells that you have available and you can also see the spells that your opponent has. So if you see that your opponent has a spell that costs six blue mana and six red mana, you can go out of your way to match blue mana gems and red mana gems to starve the enemy of the resources they need to cast their spell. Conversely, they can do the same to you. This creates a fun push and pull dynamic that is at the core of what makes Puzzle Quest work really well and differentiates it from your typical match three game, before you even consider that this has so many of the usual RPG trappings tied into it.
As I mentioned above, pretty much all of this is the same as what was in the original Puzzle Quest so what’s changed? What makes this game worth it in 2025?
When Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords was released back in 2007 (OH MY GOD 2007?!) it had the original campaign and four classes. In 2008 there was an expansion titled “The Revenge of the Plague Lord” that was released, which added a new quest line to the game, and 4 additional classes. As far as I know, this expansion never made it to the PC and only came to consoles.
In 2019 Puzzle Quest was released on the Nintendo Switch with a bunch of additional content, including new quests, four new classes, new items, new enemies, and new spells.
Now in 2025, we have Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, and it has a GRIP (this is a technical term. It means a LOT) of changes that stand out immediately. First, Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition has all of the previous expansions for Puzzle Quest, and all the assets have been redrawn to be compatible with HD and 4K screens. The gems all have unique shapes as well, which is a big deal from an accessibility standpoint. One of my fellow colleagues here at SmashPad, Filippo Dinolfo, has brought up how important accessibility is across many of his reviews, and the gem change here is one I KNOW he would appreciate. Some folks may find the gems a bit garish because they can have that smoothed “uprez-sheen-look” that pixel graphics can have when someone applies a filter on them to make them compatible with 4K displays, but the good news is you can adjust the Blur setting in the options screen to help mitigate the effect.
In additional to the change to the gem shapes, there are options to set a timeframe for how quickly the game will display a hint on what gems you can match, as well as options for text speed, and battle animations. These updates can make the game move quicker overall if you want it to.
Other changes that I noticed were that your class selection does not change what your portrait looks like. In the past version of Puzzle Quest you were stuck with specific portraits but in Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, you can choose any portrait for any class. So if you like the look of a particular character, you can use it.
Despite all of this, Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition isn’t without its flaws. One thing that hasn’t changed is the game definitely feels like it still cheats. In my fight with the skeleton which happens early on in the game, the enemy got a six match, a five match another five match and a four match all on the second turn. This was after they damaged me , and the additional matches all have wild cards attached to them. This led to the skeleton having over 20 mana points in each mana on turn four. Another fight shortly after that with a bat had me down to 8 health on turn 8 while the vampire bat had 71/86.
When you enter a battle you can select easy, normal, and hard. Easy hits you with a -25% penalty to your XP and your money, but if you want a smoother experience, at least as you are learning the game, I totally recommend taking it. The 25% loss is barely noticeable and it will be worth not feeling like the computer is cheating and throwing you a beating.
Another missed opportunity was with the classes. With so many classes in the game, I do wish the developers had provided more information about the classes and how to play them. The previous releases of Puzzle Quest never properly explained the classes, and the balance/function of the classes hasn’t really been addressed here despite the base gameplay being almost 20 years old. In the late 2000s that may have been acceptable but in 2025, there really should have been SOMETHING done to help ease players into the game with their classes because if you pick the wrong class, one that requires a much higher level to acquire skills and spells to really get rolling, you could find yourself hitting a hard difficulty wall very early in the game.
The game also doesn’t really explain how the base building works, so you can spend money on buildings early in the game when money is relatively scarce and see no benefit from it. The game also doesn’t tell you that shops rotate their stock after every battle, so if you see something you want and don’t have the cash for it, you will probably decide you’re going to grind money for it like you would in other RPG, right? Well, that doesn’t really work in Puzzle Quest because the item you wanted won’t be in the shop the next time you go. Eventually the shops rotate stock so the item you’re looking for will be back, but it will require you go through more battles. This feels archaic in 2025.
The force feedback/rumble on the Switch is obnoxious as well. An option to turn it off would have been welcome.
In my playthrough I encountered achievements popping for the wrong things, after putting points into skills the options screen would pop up instead of going back to the main map, and I also encountered general spelling errors that really should have been fixed. It’s little things like that which make you ask the question “… they really couldn’t have fixed that before release?” But again, this game is $11.99 until the beginning of October. I have no idea what the budget was for this re-release, so I can let a lot of things slide. I’ve encountered far bigger bugs–including game breaking ones–in releases that cost $69.99.
So if you’ve made it this far, you probably want a numerical score and I’m sorry, I can’t give you one. I can’t assign Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition a numerical value because I think those are relative, and an 8 to me might be a 4 to you, or vice versa. What I can say is Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition, despite its flaws, is a genuine VALUE. It’s worth FAR more than its asking price, and that’s RARE these days.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I played this on my PC, my OLED Steam Deck, and on my Nintendo Switch. It runs PERFECTLY on all three, 60 FPS (or more depending on your setup), and both the Switch and Steam Deck support touch controls.
by Leigh Lamb
