Laruaville 15

I'm actually on the fence about this newest Laruaville, but there's no "neutral" rating and I didn't want it to look like I'm panning the game either. The latest adventure of the ghosts building a town involves the familiar pink ghost helping an alien ghost who's crashed into the Laruaville planet. In exchange for having his spaceship restored, the alien rebuilds the pink ghost's town, which has somehow gotten completely wrecked in the crash.

There are 110 M3-puzzle levels in which the goal is to figure out how to obtain all the coins so the money can be used to rebuild things. If you find the randomly appearing sparkles in the scene building area, you'll get a few extra coins. In between every few levels, you'll get a minigame (mahjong, slider puzzle, or spot the difference scene) which also award a few extra coins if you play them as they appear. If you skip them and replay from the level replay section, don't get the coins. With 15 mahjong, 20 slider puzzles, and 10 spot the difference scenes, there's more balance to the minigame types than before, when it seemed like there were a ton of solitaire games.

The mechanic of having only certain playing tiles awarding powerups is back from the previous Laruaville game, which makes this one more challenging than many of the earlier Laruavilles. A key part of the strategy involves having your powerups in just the right location. The bombs have been improved to where you don't need a match to move them anymore, and have a bigger range, which is nice.

While the game is billed as being more challenging, I found this is mostly for the first half. Even with the needing to get your powerups in particular spots, the second half of the game had less steps to solve the puzzles. The more I played, the more I felt like this game was rushed to publication. It's not just the levels getting paradoxically easier making me wonder if they were hurrying to finish the game for some deadline, but there are also glitches which don't become apparent until you've played for a long time. The most annoying one was discovering "doing everything" and building the scene ASAP causing a progression block which can't be gotten around. And the progression block bug kicks in when you're just a few levels away from 100%! The only recourse I had was to start completely over with a new player and intentionally skip all the minigames and not build any scene parts until the ghost pestered me to do so! I noticed a level or 2 where playing tiles became invisible and blocked piece flow, requiring a restart, and the mahjong minigame replay section is bugged where you can advance the level counter too far and break all the replay functionality of the mahjong games.

[update] A patch for the game was issued at Steam sometime within the past few days after I'd posted this review which fixed the progression block bug as well as the mahjong replay bug.

Interesting twist to M3 gameplay as always with these games...and with so many different widgets in the puzzles plus something new in every installment, it's never the "same old, same old" M3 here. But maybe the developer needs to take a step back and note the details a bit more. Quality is often better than quantity.