We’ve already had a love letter to the Match-3 genre this year in Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To, and only a few short months later we’ve got another similar venture in Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. Only this is something different. Coming from Strange Scaffold, the developer behind games like El Paso, Elsewhere, and I Am Your Beast, Dinosaur Mansion 3 celebrates visual novels, narrative choice games and even Metroidvanias in one tight eight-hour package. How does this wicked genre fusion blend pan out when it comes from the same studio that has now developed 10(!) games in the last four years? Surprisingly pretty bloody well.

You are J.J. Macfield, a brand new survival horror protagonist to the beloved (fake) franchise’s anticipated third entry. Entering a mansion filled with giant dinosaurs, lab experiments gone wrong and a whole lot of other madness, Macfield has some pretty big shoes to fill as he follows in the footsteps of the deceased prior hero. What ensues is a typical survival horror affair… only you’re solving puzzles and combat encounters with match-3 gameplay as the game of Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 falls apart around you, breaking the fourth wall.

Taking place over six chapters, you pick apart the mansion’s halls, uncovering the secrets within. You do so via visual novel-style dialogue exchanges and encounters, and in between these moments, you’re presented with an overworld map of the mansion, showing the many ways choices can branch the narrative and flesh out the experience. Players progress by charting all of these different paths, gaining new information, skills, and items to then clear up a narrative route that previously would otherwise be closed off due to lacking something valuable. This is where the -vania part of Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 comes in; you’re experiencing new encounters by suddenly, say, growing a calf injury gradually throughout the game, then coming back to a previous encounter you could once outrun, now experiencing something new.

This narrative approach is clever and endearing for a majority of the runtime, allowing for new routes filled with hijinks to ensue. Suddenly, you can understand the full deal behind that hallway with stock images of clowns with added context. In the backend, you can run into creepy fourth-wall-breaking stuff that is both incredibly topical to the current landscape in the world today, but also so painfully self-aware it feels like the game is somehow watching you. Where this lets up is in the final portion, where you’re chasing and polishing up half-pursued routes and making sure you’ve experienced everything. Though it indicates what you’ve gotten (skills for J.J, all dead end paths, items) in each chapter, it doesn’t show you that for each individual node of a chapter, meaning that you’re often forgetting what you truly have and haven’t done, finding the one last piece in a previously visited sequence. It’s a pain and results in a lot of unintended re-visiting of a sequence you didn’t intend to.

Still, Dinosaur Mansion 3 manages to mostly overcome this tedium annoyance by being so damn charming all the time. This is thanks to the writing chops that have long persisted through all of Strange Scaffold’s releases of the last four years. Once again, there’s a good sense of humour throughout, and though I think having voice acting (including the dulcet tones of studio head Xalavier Nelson that have appeared for several games now) would have elevated the experience, it translates well solely in written form. Macfield is a survival horror protagonist aware that he’s a survival horror protagonist, and therefore, he’s often quipping and commenting on the genre’s tropes that await him in the mansion. Y’know, giant dinosaur ten times his size chasing him down a tight hallway, only to escape in the nick of time. That sort of thing.

Strange Scaffold also finds the time amongst all this to make the writing poignant in meaningful ways. As I write this review, Strange Scaffold and fellow indie dev studios are getting the word out about Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 by talking about its (need I remind you fictional!) predecessors in sensationalist ways on social media. It’s a handy one-up and alley-oop for marketing of the game to do this because how games live is through discussion, and how they die is being lost to time. Dinosaur Mansion 3 explores what it’s like for a game to do both, as things progress and the lines between being a video game character and a line of code in a forgotten game begin to blur.

None of this is a secret either, the game’s listing says all this, detailing that the title is  “A story about sequels, game development, and the horrible, beautiful things that happen when the foundation of your reality falls apart.”  Knowing this, the 6-8 hours of game you play pull no punches, commenting on the trials and tribulations of game development. Considering how Xalavier Nelson has confided in interviews that El Paso, Elsewhere was sort of a ‘final shot’ for Strange Scaffold, mere days from the company running out of money, this feels like the much-needed vent session for the studio. One where the writing leaps off the screen and you feel Scaffold’s plights and victories amongst them. It’s the kind of writing you don’t see enough of in games, and when you do, it’s an honest breath of fresh air.

Thanks to these abilities, what often ensues is engaging battles of push vs pull where you’re winning by the skin of your teeth. In later battles, enemy attacks can deplete all your health in one go, so you’re having to juggle chipping away at getting the right symbols for both your attacks and the ones that prevent others. This means that battles are rarely leaving you complacent, and instead, strategising how best to match to send a cascade of subsequent matches in one turn. Items and permanent upgrades that you later unlock and purchase in a shop at a bar are an additional means of providing aid throughout your venture, either turning the tide of a specific match or helping pass skill checks where you need, say, x amount of max health to progress to a new route. It’s always handy to be stocked up on these, and might I add that the Minigun item is often what you want, destroying a large number of symbols in one go to shake up the board, causing a high match combo. No joke, I once got almost 20 matches in one turn.

Combat also spares no expense in finding novel ways to implement humour. Despite matches often being reskins of one another, at least the coat of paint you’re getting is charming. One instance had J.J. needing to shut down a computer that was corrupting the mansion. Pretty standard stuff. Only as a defence, it throws out attacks to you that remove your progress and shoves adorable dog pictures in your face, diegetically distracting J.J. Bumping into ghosts and killer plants Little Shop of Horrors-style… there’s no shortage of oddities throughout that make for engaging encounters.

Match 3 mechanics in Dinosaur Mansion 3 are so refined that when there’s the odd fight that isn’t quite as good, they stick out. One instance has you fighting a clown pterodactyl hybrid, where it has moves that essentially stunlock you and stop you from making any solid progress or even a means of getting out of its attack. This is simply down to luck and RNG, and whether you’re unfortunate enough to be lacking in symbols or defensive items at the time the attack comes in. If you do get in this stunlock loop, it’s deeply unsatisfying and frustrating. The menus even comment on the fact that this fight is unbalanced, and though that makes for a believable universe in the context of the entire game, that still doesn’t resolve the fact that Strange Scaffold created an encounter that is simply not fun to play.