Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3is a match-3 game, a metroidvania, and an RPG, the kind of genre hybrid that only really makes sense when you play it. At the start, it’s a survival horror sci-fi comedy where you lead a government employee through a mansion full of dinosaurs. But as is often the case with developer Strange Scaffold’s games, things get chaotic, and fast.
Match Me Outside
CRDM3 is incredibly meta, in that it’s a game about game development, itsowndevelopment, and also bug hunting. Early on, protagonist J.J. Hardwell realises he’s a character in a video game and is sent on a quest to track down and eradicate bugs by defeating them. Naturally, you do this through match-3 games.
As I wrote about the game’s demo, these match-3 games are surprisingly challenging and diverse in their objectives. Matching symbols adds them to your bank, allowing you to use them to execute skills, which are often themed to the specific encounter you’re in. For example, taking down a flying dinosaur in a gallery full of paintings might mean using symbols to hurl a painting at it, knocking it to the ground. You’ll use match-3 games to complete any kind of task, and each is well designed and varied enough that the mechanic, somehow, never gets boring.
Well, until you’ve done the same encounter a bunch of times in an attempt to complete every branch in the game, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Even these match-3 games are ripe with opportunities for humour, in keeping with the overall tone of the game. Some encounters will make it so that matching specific symbols will damage your character – I once accidentally set off a 19x combo and had to watch with gritted teeth as the damage killed my character. It was hilarious in a way I didn’t expect match-3 gameplay could even be.
Bugs On Bugs
But the match-3 aspect is just one part of the gameplay. As I mentioned before, this is very much a game about bug hunting, which is executed in a metroidvania format. CRDM3 is part RPG, in the sense that as you navigate its narrative, you’ll make choices and use skills as you go. The big difference is that you’re able to essentially move through time by returning to checkpoints, redoing encounters as you wish and exploring every possible outcome of a situation.
CRDM3 tracks your progress with a chart of branches that you’ve explored, visually representing every branch in the game. In order to 100 percent the game, you have to unlock every trait, explore every single branch fully, and play every board. In a sense, you are fully testing the game for bugs, checking every single branch to ensure that it’s kosher.
If this sounds laborious, well… it kinda is. This is where the most annoying parts of CRDM3 emerge. While there are checkpoints aplenty and information about how many branches you’ve fully completed and how many traits you’ve fully unlocked, there’s still not enough information to identify exactly where you came across a specific enemy and if there are options you haven’t explored. It’s easy to get confused and end up running through the same branches over and over again in an attempt to figure out where you missed something. I still have two traits I need to unlock to 100 percent the game, and I can’t for the life of me complete them.
Part of what had me running in circles is the sheer number of bugs I came across while playing, though hopefully these will be patched out by the time it launches. To be fair, though, the game’s bug-testing narrative made its bugginess almost funny, as if it were part of the game, another meta layer on top of everything else. It’s hard to be mad about game-breaking bugs when the entire point of the game is that it’s hard as hell to make a video game.
It was also very funny to watch these bugs get patched out as I messaged PR about them. Bug hunting onsomany levels.
And the gamedoesmake subsequent jaunts through familiar branches easier. As you progress, making certain choices and completing certain encounters will reward you with traits that make the game significantly easier. One, Feral, which I got by eating objects one would generally consider inedible, allowed me to skip past a whole series of fights by simply eating my enemy.
You’ll also get cash from every encounter, which you can use at checkpoints to buy items to make encounters far easier than they were the first time round. You’ll be able to upgrade skills such as your max health and carrying capacity as well, meaning that you can breeze past battles in a couple of turns instead of having to grind through them. It’s very easy to get cash, so you’re never incentivised to hold on to items instead of using them.
Laughing Through The Pain
CRDM3 can be frustrating by nature of the features it lacks, which doesn’t always make for a pleasant player experience. I fear that I may be understating just how fun the minute-to-minute gameplay can be at its best, though, and I haven’t gotten into howfunnyit is.
Which it is. It’s got a wonderful, absurd sense of humour, the kind of madcap comedy that makes my favourite series,Like a Dragon, so endearing to people. You’ll steal a book from an octopus in a library. You’ll throw pies at a dinosaur. You have an evil twin. It’s easy for comedy to border on cringe – writing humour can be really hard! – but CRDM3 never feels cringey, just earnestly funny.
That’s partly because of skillful writing, but it’s also because CRDM3 is grounded in a very real, contemporary issue – the state of the games industry. Much of its humour is rooted in satire of game development as a career, the instability that comes with it, the way developers are treated as expendable, the way projects can disappear with just a moment’s notice.
That’s the crux of CRDM3. Under all the dinosaurs, the bug hunting, and the match-3 boards, it is at its core a love letter to game development and an indictment of the industry as it exists now. It seems impossible for one short game to juggle all this, to feel so unique in a gameplay sense and so prescient in a thematic one, and yet, it does. If only I wasn’t fighting against all these real-life bugs in an attempt to find the fictional ones.
