Hey, why am I always “matching three” anyways?
I’ve never really thought about that until I played Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. Like countless puzzle games, the latest from I Am Your Beast developer Strange Scaffold has me clearing colorful gems off a board by swapping matches together. It’s a genre staple that I’ve never really given much thought to. It’s just sort of what you do. But why is that the thing I do? Why did the developers build it that way? Why do developers build anything they way they do? What does anything mean? Before I knew it, I was tumbling down a candy-coated rabbit hole trying to read gems like tea leaves and divine their true meaning.
Okay, that probably sounds like an excessive reaction to a game called Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, but it’s not so out there in context. What begins as a genre mash-up gag, one that I can imagine being born from several layers of inside jokes between developers, soon reveals itself as a transparent view into how the raptor sausage is made. Between all of those match three puzzle boards lives a documentary about one deceptively complicated game’s tumultuous development cycle. It smashes the fourth wall to reveal the complex series of pipes and wires that keep even the smallest, silliest of games running.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is the long-awaited sequel to Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion, a foundational puzzle-adventure hybrid released 20 years ago. It replaces fan favorite hero Jack Briar with a new dinosaur hunting special agent who finds himself trapped in a mansion full of reptiles and puzzles. Like its predecessor, it’s a self-proclaimed “matchtroidvania” in which players navigate a manor’s halls and overcome obstacles that manifest as standard match three puzzles. Fighting off a dinosaur requires me to match knives together to do deal damage, while special moves can be activated by spending stocked up gems. It’s an RPG with stat upgrades and tabletop-like skills, a survival horror game with a stress meter to maintain, and a choose your own text adventure with multiple dead ends and branching paths. It’s an inventive hybrid that mixes and matches genre conventions to create something entirely new.
Oh yeah, there’s one other small detail I should mention: Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion does not exist.
While the story initially presents itself as a farcical parody of Resident Evil, that’s a ruse that hides a meta narrative. I learn that early on when a creepy bartender informs me that the chapter I’ve played is actually just a snippet cobbled together a PC demo event. At first, I assume that I had accidentally been sent the game’s Steam Next Fest demo instead of the full game and nearly sent out an email to get it corrected. I kept with it instead as the bartender put me in debug mode and sent me off to squash bugs within the very game I was playing. From there, I was swept away in a sea of development in-jokes as I stepped into rooms with unfinished art, met glitchy dinosaurs, and learned the fake history of the Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion series.
My instinct was to roll my eyes at first, assuming that I was in for a few hours of pure irony needlessly laced into a surprisingly creative puzzle game. While the basics of matching gems isn’t new, Strange Scaffold builds on that foundation in clever ways. The idea of harvesting matched gems to activate powers actually gives what I’m doing meaning rather than dropping me into an abstracted puzzle board. I learn to carefully deploy resources, stockpiling red gems for when I need to heal or strategically using one of the few items I can gold to suck up a 3×3 patch of gems. My favorite touch is that I gain persistent status effects as I explore different story paths, which unlock dialogue options much later on that open more paths. It’s a collection of great ideas that initially feels underserved by the narrative irreverence.
But Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 isn’t just playing things meta for cheap laughs. It’s deadly serious. The deeper I get, the more I realize that I’m not just learning about a fake game. Rather, I’m getting the actual development story of the game I’m playing. Design intricacies are explained to me outright. Real features that were cut turn into comedic gags. A story about the game’s long development cycle turn out to be sincere reflections on a game that almost never existed. My character’s stress meter isn’t just a funny thing to put into a puzzle game; it’s reflective of the very real anxiety that had to be managed behind the scenes. It’s a reminder that we know virtually nothing about how the games we play come to be.
While it isn’t the all-access tell-all of Double Fine’s PsychOdyssey, the studio’s sobering documentary about Psychonauts 2‘s tough life cycle, Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is a playful way to demystify video game development. It does that in a way that only Strange Scaffold really can. This is a studio fueled by unbridled creative chaos, where no idea is too stupid so long as you take it seriously enough. We’ve seen that energy turn a dumb pun into the unsettling horror of Clickholding, transform an ska-filled animal poker goof into a moving one-act play about risk, and satirize the stock market through an organ trading simulator. They all sound like elaborate jokes on paper, but like Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, they all have something that they’re eager to communicate with us. The less space there is for experimental projects that dare to cut against the grain, the less colorful our world will be — a puzzle well only filled with red gems.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is out now on PC.
