Runes of Avalon is at first glance similar to many PC puzzle games I’ve been playing, but there are many little twists to your basic “match three” game that it definitely deserves a second look.
There is a backstory to the game, which is loosely based on King Arthur’s legendary wizard Merlin. Evelyne is Merlin’s apprentice, who’s in the middle of learning how to manage the runes, when suddenly Merlin gets sucked into some kind of evil vortex. Now she’s journeying to far away lands to find out how to defeat the evil Morganna, using the power of the runes to guide her. But of course she needs your help!
The game itself involves clearing the board of different colored runes by matching them and transforming them into “rune magic”, and filling up the gauges or “magic orbs” with this magic for each rune color before time runs out. You have to align at least three runes in a row, but if you are able to match 4 or more, you can get bonus points or later on, trigger special spells that replace some of the runes. The runes drop in different combinations and arrangements, and it’s up to you to rotate the pieces in order to align them to match. In the middle of the magic orbs, you’re able to see what piece is coming next (a la “Tetris” style), to help plan your next move.
Along the way, you’ll learn special spells which will help you complete a level. In order to learn the spell, you play a special level in which a rune appears in the middle, and you have to click on the matching rune as quickly as you can. The new spells allow you to do things like blow up parts of the board (and collect the rune magic from the runes), or switch runes around, sometimes resulting in matches.
Your game progresses on a map, which pretty much shows you where you’re headed. Each time you get to a large dot on the map, your objective on that level is to clear a very large rune in the middle of the board. In order to do this, you have to place four runes in a square on each side of the large rune. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, and placement can be tricky especially when it’s so easy to match three runes. You just have to place them in such a way that you have open space so that you can fit your pieces without matching the runes you want to keep.
Then the next main area you visit will make you unscramble a picture of the new land, which is a lot easier than I thought when I first had to do it. I originally thought it was one of those games where you had to slide squares around until the pieces were all in the right place. In reality, all you are doing is swapping pieces back and forth until they are in the right place, and then they lock in place. What’s also easy is that if you look fast, you can see the correct picture underneath the puzzle pieces.
You can also play in “Quick Play” mode, where you just play the game in time attack or endless mode. You can either play levels you’ve already completed in your quest, or a whole other set of levels. It looked like there was an option to download and play more levels, but it wasn’t clickable for me, which might be because I need to finish the quest levels first but I wasn’t sure.
There’s also a little gallery of the nice pictures of the lands that you pieced together in the puzzle.
Overall, this game is very entertaining, and the graphics are nice looking, though Evelyne has these weird creepy wide eyes. Also when you create a player profile, my computer seemed to lock up a bit on the music, but then after a few seconds it was back to normal. The backstory wasn’t all that engaging, the narratives were too long for my patience, and after the initial time playing it through, I found myself being grateful for the “skip” button. The first few narratives had audio, and it was a bit disconcerting if I clicked “next” before the narrator stopped talking on the previous frame, because he just kept talking as if you were still on that page. So I’m reading the text, yet the narrator is way behind.
If you can get over these little nit-picky things, and just play the game itself, you’ll have a much better experience! It’s definitely a “must-play” game for me.
Special thanks to Roman Budzowski at Anawiki Games for providing the full version of this game.