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Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats To Match-3 To has been on our radar for a while now, and with its appearance at this year’s Wholesome Direct during Summer Game Fest, I knew I had to go and check out the new demo.
It’s different to the endless demo that Alice wrote about in February, which isn’t available here. Instead, you get a taster of the game’s story and versus modes. And with that, an introduction to some of the characters you’ll meet (and maybe even date).
I don’t think I could write anything better than Alice’s take on Spirit Swap’s gameplay, because she really nails the lo-fi, chill vibes it’ll give you. I do want to give developer Soft Not Weak a shoutout for perfectly capturing the flow of all those match-3 games with a story mode. It reminds me of so many arcade-style games I played endless as a kid, ones which were built for two players rather than one, with a story mode weirdly shoehorned in. With those, it was usually a competition between the game’s characters to be the best in the world or win a tournament at matching 3s, but in Spirit Swap it’s just a bunch of friends helping spirits move on to the next world. To me, that’s pure wholesome nostalgia with no rose-tinted glasses in sight.
Story mode is made even better thanks to its cast of characters. You play as Samar, with her froggy familiar, and meet 3 of her friends. There’s Leon, a reserved tattooist who has a huge interest in the latest trending boyband. Then there’s Mo, who’s having a rough time after going through a break up with mutual friend Iskander, who’s also going through the motions thanks to the break up. Ah, the course of true love never did run smooth.
It makes me so happy to see such a diverse cast in a game. Each character is loud and proud of their identity and their worries revolve around things like how to get over heartbreak or snagging tickets to a gig, not the rubbish we have to deal with in real life like taxes and legislation that’s slowly trying to kill us.
The new story demo is only available until June 30, so there’s still a couple of weeks to try it out.