O.C.D.

Kind of dissapointed by the lack of
door locking and hand washing mini-games.

O.C.D. is an indie game created by Pouncing Kitten Games for Xbox Live released on February 2^nd 2012. It is a match three game that is RPG centric, stating that it guts frivolous role playing tropes in favor of a game that just focuses on character development. Is it a good Role Playing match three game, similar in vain to the Puzzle Quest series?

I like to match weapons and pretend
my character is cutting... monsters!

The graphics are very simple. There’s not even a background to speak of, just the color blue. The circles that you’ll be matching are colorful and contain a lot of variety, but I feel like this almost hurts some areas of the game. Sometimes I have trouble distinguishing what color a circle is because the overlapping symbol takes up most of the space. This isn’t really an issue when you’re doing the collapse-esque puzzles. The music is forgettable and the sounds include popping. Lots and lots of popping.

This is where you pick up resources for item crafting. Collect
all those... squid... tentacles? You'll use them to make
awesome Whale's Squid Plate of Tentacle Rape + 5.

As I previously mentioned, the main game play aspect is match three, like Puzzle Quest or Bejeweled. There’s also item crafting, which has you rolling dice to get certain numbers, almost reminding me of Yhatzee. But to do the crafting you first need items which require resources, something you accumulate in the Collapse-esque mini games. You can also level up and gain skill and magic points, and this is where the match three aspects comes in. When you choose Level you match circles to gain experience. When you gain a level you get LP which you use to boost your main stats, Health, Magic, Stamina, Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity.  Each of these stats will affect various things, such as how many turns you have when doing the different Collapse and Match games, or how many re-rolls you get when forging an item.

Not exactly sure how a mace can suffer from a mental illness,
but I'll take it!

When you play the skill match three game you gain SP that you can use to boost the several different skills that you have access to. Examples of these include Courage, which reduces the number of experiences points you need to reach the next level, or Survivalist which increases the amount of food you get when playing the food gathering Farming game. This is where you’ll encounter a bug in the game, as some of the skills are mislabeled. The skill Observation says it reduces spell costs, but when you put points into it your skill costs go down.

A warrior named Addicted. I named mine Criesinbeer, after
my favorite activity. Well actually it's my second favorite, I just
couldn't get Masturbatesinawell to fit.

Though this game is simple and kind of repetitive, I still found myself enjoying it. It does present you with the simple pleasures of building up a character, but I can’t help but feel the game is lacking for this very reason without any clear objectives or a story. I know that this is one of the selling points of the game, that it doesn’t include those extra frilly features, but it also makes the game feel like it’s just a generic time waster. Since the mini games start out only giving you a move or two, you often want to play “just one more game” which frequently turns into ten more games. Increasing your stats and crafting and farming is fun. But the game is only 80MSP, and for that price it’s hard to complain. If you like match three games and RPG’s, this will definitely be a dollar well spent for you. I think there is room for another game like this, so I’m hopeful that the developer is working on a sequel or that someone else may have another match three RPG in the works, because I think it’s already been established that these games can work well.