Puzzle Quest 3 arrives next month to steal all your free time

Puzzle Quest 3 was announced last year, and now developer Infinity Plus Two has announced that it will launch on Steam Early Access on March 1st 2022—the fifteenth anniversary of the original game's release. "We'll be working with the community to get the balance and feel of PQ3 just right on PC," writes Steve Fawkner, CEO and creative lead, "while also experimenting with new features based on your feedback, including controller support!"

The game features five classes—Paladin, Berzerker, Assassin, Necromancer and Shaman—and can be played in multiplayer co-op and PvP mode. I've been looking at the various gifs and videos but I can't see that anything dramatic has been changed in the game's core puzzling activity.

Puzzle Quest is one of those low-key perfect games. It's never going to win any game of the year awards, but while the big beasts stomp around boasting about huge campaigns and ray-traced shrubbery, Puzzle Quest (or its even better sequel) sits quietly on your machine sucking up hour after hour in peaceful tile-sliding fashion, while you become ever-more attuned to its atmosphere and kinks. As our own Evan wrote in a review of PQ2: "I'm almost embarrassed by the sense of drama I felt from such an outwardly modest game."

The big pitch this time, apart from the fact it's more Puzzle Quest, is 3D graphics in the background: Watch the warrior bash the skeleton in glorious fashion! It's set 500 years after the original game, and features hundreds of quests, dungeons with mega loot, and RPG-style levelling. The game will be free-to-play, and you can pre-register here to get some in-game rewards on release. I am going to play a lot of this game.