There’s no question that the indie gaming space, at its best, runs on fresh and fun ideas. Now, what form that may take in any given genre may vary wildly, as new ideas in a shooter versus ones in the casual gaming space will likely look radically different. In this case though, we’re talking about the puzzle gaming arena, and what Mate’Morphosis brings to the table is an unusual fusion of chess pieces, their movement, and a smattering of a few other rules to give players something they undoubtedly have never encountered before.

Early on, this works out well enough, as anyone who knows the basic moves for each chess piece will likely pick up on the idea pretty quickly. In general, you’ll be moving one piece in order to capture another, taking on that captured piece’s moves, jumping to another piece, and so on, until you capture the enemy king. Once you get a little further you’ll then need to think a little more carefully though, as sometimes the cost of hopping from one piece to another is too expensive in terms of moves so you’ll instead stick with your current piece to position yourself over multiple moves before possibly taking another.

To some extent the game does a reasonable job of getting away with this, even though there’s no up-front explanation for how anything in the game works. To the developer’s credit, even people who are a little more shaky on chess would likely pick up on how individual pieces can move, since it does provide indicators for where your current piece can go. Where I think things break down a bit is that as the game tries to add on more complexity, the lack of any explanations starts to work against the overall experience. The energy indicator in the upper-left corner starts to take on far greater importance, as making certain moves can add or remove varying amounts of your energy, meaning you’ll need to apply far more strategy as you take in the board and plot your moves. While there is a challenge to be had here across the game’s 60 levels, I do think that the simple charms it starts out with begin to fade the further you get. It is a novel puzzler, for sure, but it would be nice if there were something more that would grab you and maintain more of a sense of fun.