Spellarium 5

I have played four previous Spellarium games and really enjoyed them.
I would have continued playing more, but I put this game on my laptop and I was going to play future editions to play during lunch at work.
Then, I realized that you have to be online to start the game.

I cannot, and will not ever give a positive review to any dev that requires a single player game to be online! There's absolutely no GOOD reason why this is beneficial to the player! It's just a match-3 game!

I also have a couple of other match-3 games form LGT SIA that requires I be online. It looks like every game from them does this!

No more LGT SIA games for me. I'm done!

I originally got this elsewhere, but decided to buy it again because this is one of my favorite games of the Spellarium series. There are a bunch of these games now, and even more in the other 2 series this developer does (Laruaville, Cursed House) in which you must remove obstacles in some pattern to obtain all the coins. If you enjoy more challenging puzzles with your M3 games, this one rivals some of the hardest Cursed House games because it's possible to make solving a level far more difficult if you do things in the wrong order. This was also the first game to introduce the toggle gates, which close off sections of the board. Later games have a more sophisticated gate mechanic, but in this game, the cascades can be as much a pain as pleasure with tripping the gates.

You have 110 M3-puzzle levels in which the goal is always to obtain all the coins, and tons of minigames (mahjong, solitaire, spot the difference scenes, and hidden object scenes) of which one appears about every 3 levels. The newer feature of being able to replay levels on demand wasn't introduced yet, so beware of skipping any levels if you're a completionist.

I also get a chuckle out of the scene to build, with light emerging from the oddest places.