The Stack

The nondescriptively-titled Loot Hunter is a pirate-themed game in the genre that I’d call “puzzle-quest-like” if that weren’t so ambiguous. It’s ambiguous because Puzzle Quest was two-layered, an RPG wrapped around a match-3, and you can generalize that into either “RPG wrapped around an arbitrary minigame”, as in Runespell: Overture, or “arbitrary overgame wrapped around a match-3”, as in Hunie Pop. Loot Hunter is basically the latter, although the overgame is pretty RPG-ish in every way but presentation.

In presentation, it’s Grand Theft Galleon. Your ship freely roams a map of an archipelago, trading goods from port to port, doing optional quests, hunting for buried treasure, and attacking other ships for their booty. The game’s intro text makes it sound like you’ll have to choose between the path of the honest trader or that of the freebooter, but in fact there’s very little motivation to refrain from pursuing every path at once. Even if you’re just doing quests, the British can give you quests to attack French or Spanish vessels and vice versa. The three-sided faction system reminds me a little of GTA2, but only a little.

The main reason I’m singling this game out for a blog post is that it’s a very clear demonstration of something I’ve observed before: if you stuff a match-3 into an overgame, I will be unable to stop playing it, even after it stops being fun.

To be clear, it does start off fun. It starts off by giving you a bunch of things to explore! There’s a terrain exploration element, with most of the map shrouded by clouds until you sail them off. There are special ship-to-ship combat skills, essentially spells, to acquire and upgrade. There’s a series of increasingly large and expensive ships to buy, and items you can install in them for bonuses. And of course there’s the matter of figuring out the best tactics in match-3 ship-to-ship combat. The thing is, none of this lasts. It doesn’t take long to explore the full extents of the map, and once you’ve done that, there’s no more exploration. It doesn’t take long after that to max out your spells. Once that’s done, there’s nothing stopping you from discovering the optimal tactics, which you don’t have to vary ever.

Well, that’s not quite true. Sometimes you’ll be attacked by a ship that’s simply too powerful for you — say, if they have enough cannons to take you down in three volleys or fewer — in which case your tactics should shift to rapidly acquiring enough mana to cast the “escape from combat” spell. But in all other cases, including cases where the enemy outguns you only a little, you can treat all encounters the same, because they basically are. There’s none of the variability in rules or abilities or obstacles or even just board shape that I expect of a good match-3; the only differences between ships are differences in power. Even when the game describes an encounter as being with a group of ships instead of only one, it’s treated like just one larger ship in combat.

Once you’re that far, the game is really significantly reduced, and you’ve still got hours before you can afford the biggest of ships. And yet I wound up playing long enough to do that, and a little while longer besides. At this point, I’m not really getting anything out of the experience, apart perhaps from the opportunity to listen to it — the music is really lovely, varying from Jolly Little Nautical Tune to Stirring Adventure Music to Dark Orchestral Menace, and the sound of splintering wood from the cannons is really well-done. The game doesn’t seem to strictly have an ending, but there’s one more goal — maxing out your social status — that’s so close that I may well wind up playing to that. After that, there are some Achievements that are basically only achievable by playing for a very long time after the game has been rendered completely trivial and devoid of further goals.

The lack of a definite ending may be the game’s biggest design problem. An ending provides a basis for balance: ideally, in a game based around leveling and upgrades, everything the player is doing should reach its peak at around the game’s end, which is to say, at around the same time. Lacking anything like this to tether the game’s systems to, different parts of Loot Hunter have their endings at wildly different times.