3°C: Sand Puzzle Review

Products You May Like

A Colourful Cascade or a Sandy Snoozefest?

For years, the KEMCO team have seemingly focused on one thing, and one thing only: filling the gaming landscape with about as many retro-styled RPGS as they could get away with.

We stopped counting as they released a 50-game bundle on Xbox back in 2023, but since then, barely a week or two has gone by without a new KEMCO RPG for us to slather over.

But slowly and surely that same team has seen that focus pivot ever so slightly, launching a few visual novel type games to the market. And now they are continuing to switch things up with 3°C: Sand Puzzle.

You won’t come to 3°C: Sand Puzzle thinking that this is another RPG. The name of the game alone pretty much details what is on offer here – a sand puzzle in which you are tasked with clearing a single screen scene of a multitude of grains of sand, matching multiple colours as more randomly drop from the sky. With a few different game modes present, you best enjoy some colour matching and clicking too, because that is about all you will ever be doing with this one.

3°C Sand Puzzle review 1 — Colour matching? You got it.

Cascading Colors and Strategic Clicks

There’s enough about 3°C: Sand Puzzle to keep you busy for an hour or two, but beyond that, we feel the random nature of play, and success that is dictated by luck, could well see enjoyment wane. And there’s no doubt that it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing of games either, especially in the basic menu system that holds things together.

What you will find here though is a certain amount of addictive quality, as you look to click grains of sand away from the screen, all before more drop into play. See, whilst it is good practice to go hunting large blocks of the same colour, with connected grains being whisked away without a care, the catch with 3°C is that for every few clicks of the board, that sand will keep on falling, filling the screen, only pushed back by shifting huge swathes of grains in one big bulk.

It’s that limitation on actions that brings some strategic play to proceedings, as you cross fingers and hope that whatever tactics you decide to use, will start to come to fruition for the board you are on.

Bombs, Rainbows, and Game Modes

For us, we sat and hoped that the odd bomb would appear, clearing a large area around it, moving Stone blockers along the way. But mostly we prayed to the gods that a Rainbow grain would prove to be a game changer. Spoiler: they are, as they clear all blocks of one colour from the screen, no matter whether they are touching and matching others or not. If you get to a point in 3°C when your screen is nearly filled, and Game Over signs are slowly creeping over the horizon, those little rainbows are godsends.

Without them, a round in 3°C can be over fairly swiftly, scores dropped onto a leaderboard (local only I’m afraid, with online capability a sore miss) and the player left to roll again.

3°C Sand Puzzle review 2 — Various visual styles are nice

It’s good that KEMCO have included a few different game modes. Switching up the difficulty, from Easy to Normal to Hard, can be done through the menus, as can changing the simple visuals in terms of backgrounds, cursors and grain types. That’s all very much a muchness, even if it does let you settle on your own preferred visual style.

Understanding 3°C: Sand Puzzle’s Modes

It’ll be the game modes which tempt you in a bit more though. Two different types are present, in the form of Classic and Timed, the latter of which runs on a one, three or five minute basis. Each of those modes then has further sub-modes too: Arrange, Original and then + modes for each. .

The problem is, we’ve sat down and rinsed 3°C and these sand puzzles for pretty much everything the game has to offer over a couple of evenings of play, and if we hadn’t looked into the press blurb that came with the game, we’d still not really know the difference between those sub-modes. It’s all very minimal in the changes they offer, but with the facts in front of us, Original is bog-standard 3°C: Sand Puzzle, with little in terms of special effects. The Arrange mode then adds in the Rainbow, Bombs and Stone grains to complicate/ease matter, whilst that of + mode allows the screen to expand, building the grain numbers as it goes. It would have been nice for 3°C: Sand Puzzle to explain things.

3°C Sand Puzzle review 3 — Mesmerising, but short-lived

A Colourful But Short-Lived Puzzle Experience

We’d like a bit more clarity on what is going on within 3°C: Sand Puzzle, but that doesn’t stop it from being a fun little colour matcher, capable of keeping players busy for an hour or two. Consider the cheap asking price and you will understand why this one is just about worth a look. Don’t expect any longevity out of it though.