There are a whole lot of puzzle games that you can play. It seems like these days, everyone has come up with a remake of some classic puzzle game. Rarely do you find something that feels new and different and is still fun. If you’re looking for that, Tumblestone is the game for you!

When you are playing puzzle games, you want things to be clean, uncluttered, and easy to see at a glance on the screen. The focus should be on the puzzle. Tumblestone does a great job with that. The characters are colorful and bright and they each have their own look to them, but they don’t interfere with the puzzle playing. The puzzle concept is simple, and the appearance is clear and easy to read. The stones come in a variety of colors, which most of the time can easily be distinguished. Sometimes, the blue and purple are a bit hard to distinguish when you have clicked on one of them, because of the way it changes the background color when you have clicked on a square, but you get used to that quickly. If you are color blind, there is even a Color Blind Mode. I tested it out and it definitely changes the blocks. Personally I found them harder to tell apart, but I am not color blind.

The background music is nothing special; it’s just typical puzzle music. Each chapter of the Story Mode has a different feel to it, so there is different music as well. You do get sounds when you clear stones, but it is nothing necessary, so if you want to put on your own music, go for it. I found that putting on some faster music does help me play faster (or maybe that’s just in my head).

While you are playing the same type puzzles, there are several different modes to play. There is a story to the game that you can play and you will need to play through the story if you want to unlock more characters. Plus, it’s a great place to figure out how to play well. Each chapter has a large number of puzzles in it. The puzzles in the Story Mode are not timed and you can take as long as you want and you have as many tries as you want. If you do happen to clear it on the first try, you will get bonus XP. Story Mode goes in a linear path, but you can go back and play any previous level at any time. At the end of each chapter, you will have a head to head battle against the next character. Each chapter you are playing as a new character, which keeps things interesting. Their overall goal is to find the crown, but it’s neat how they keep switching to a new person.

When you want something a bit different, you can switch over to Arcade Mode. Here, you have the choice of Marathon, Heartbeat, or Infinipuzzle. In Marathon, you just keep playing until you lose. You are trying to raise the glass. To raise it, you have to clear every block below the glass, but it's harder than it sounds. When you match wrong, the blocks all lower. When they hit the ground, it is over. There is no time limit and the blocks only move down based on your moves. In Heartbeat, you are trying to keep going as long as you can as well, but this time the blocks move down on their own at a set speed. If you make a mismatch, they will also move down even more. Once again, keep going until they hit the bottom. Infinipuzzle will start out by asking you if you want to use modifiers. Be careful if you do because they can make it even more difficult! Infinipuzzle is like Story Mode in that if you make a mismatch, you die. You want to keep clearing puzzles as long as you can without messing up. The board will start moving down on you slowly, just to make it a bit harder.

When you get tired of playing alone, you can play Tumblestone with up to four players locally, online, or a combination of the two. I really like that you can choose to play two people locally and two more online (if you can find someone else online), because it gives you a bit more of a challenge. You can also set the bots to play against you. Fair warning, the bots can be really good depending on the difficulty level you set them to. Just a note, sadly I have yet to find anyone else online to play against. Tumblestone is a really fun multiplayer game so I hope there will be online opponents sometime!

From the Main Menu, you will also see that there are Quests and Extras. Quests are things that you will earn bonus XP if you do. Some will involve the Story Mode and some will be on the other modes. Once you complete one, you will get another. It seems like there are always four quests available (at least there are for me). In Extras, you can see your stats, check the online Leaderboards, and change up the game settings.

There is no difficulty level that you can set in Tumblestone, except when playing against the bots. In general, the puzzles start out easy and get progressively harder as you go. Like any puzzle game, you might find a level that is just stumping you for a time. They have solved this in Tumblestone. You will earn skip tokens at certain points and these can be used to skip a level that you’re just stuck on. The really nice thing is that if you decide to go back and beat that level, you will get your skip token back. This means you can use it to temporarily skip a level that you’re just beating your head on and then go back to it later when you’re fresh. I really like that they give you the token back o you can keep reusing it to avoid beating your head against a wall and giving up.

As I mentioned, you can set the difficulty of the bots that you are playing against in Multiplayer. There are five levels: Beginner Bot, Training Bot, Friendly Bot, Sparring Bot, and Nightmare Bot. Beginner is quite easy to beat for fun play. Training is a bit more difficult, but I still don’t think it’s much of a challenge. Friendly starts getting harder. I can beat Friendly fairly consistently and I can beat Sparring some. If you really want to see a challenge, just try and play against a Nightmare Bot. My brain can barely move that fast, much less my fingers!

Tumblestone is a very easy game to get the hang of the mechanics. It is a puzzle game where stones are tumbling down from the sky. Your job is to clear those stones. They come in several colors: blue, yellow, red, green, purple, and special stones. The special stones can be beneficial, like the multicolored ones. They can also be blocking stones that can only be shot through every other time or stones that have to be cleared by making other matches. You will need to shoot three stones of the same color to clear them and you can only shoot the lowest stone in a line. While this might sound easy, you are going to need to puzzle out which colors to hit first so that you will unblock other colors that you need to get to.

You use the D-pad to move your character along the bottom and your character will shoot straight up. You use (X) to fire. You can use (L1) or (L2) and (R1) or (R2) to quickly move to the far left or the far right sides. You will use the D-pad to move around the map in Story Mode as well. That’s all there is to the controls. Simple and easy to get the hang of.

I love puzzle games, but they’ve become a bit monotonous in recent years. It’s been a long time since I’ve found a puzzle game that I can’t wait to get back home to play. Tumblestone provides amazing fun in both single and in multiplayer. If you’re looking for a family game to play over the holidays, I recommend that you check out Tumblestone!