Bejeweled on Xbox Game Pass is a Smooth-Brain Puzzle Masterpiece

PopCap's match-three masterpieces are on Game Pass, but beware, you may never play anything else again

Puzzle games are considered a cerebral activity, but in truth there are two types of puzzle game. There are the ones that really give your logical deduction capabilities a workout, like Jonathan Blow's The Witness. Then there are the ones that are as gloriously and mindlessly gratifying as the dumbest, most violent shooter. In the 2000s, the masters of this latter type were PopCap Games, creators of Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies, and unholy wizards of the casual puzzle game, whose grip on players' dopamine glands has rarely been matched.

A couple of games from PopCap's pomp are currently available on Xbox Game Pass for console: the Xbox 360 versions of Bejeweled 2 and Bejeweled 3. Bejeweled, originally released as a browser game at the dawn of the millennium, is an almost insultingly simple match-three game, with similarities to Sega's Columns and Nintendo's Panel de Pon/Tetris Atttack. There's a field of brightly colored gems; swap pairs to clear lines of three or more, thus dropping more gems onto the field. Matching four or five gems creates gems with explosive special effects. That's it.

I don't think PopCap's designers would claim to have created anything especially novel or groundbreaking with Bejeweled. What they did do was polish this simple concept to an absurd degree. The crisp gamefeel, the potent sound design, the expert tuning, and the glossy, twinkling visuals suspend the player perfectly between excitement and relaxation; they synthesize a kind of blissed-out Y2K screensaver aesthetic where happiness is just one more chain away.

People often play match-three games on their phones with the sound off, but I urge you to go the other way with Bejeweled: put on your best headphones and lock in. These games have a truly amazing soundscape. Urgent but hopeful synth music burbles away under a layer of chimes and bangs. If you get a good chain, a deep voice, saturated in reverb, intones the word "EXCELLENT," and it's all the validation a person could ever need.

I could discuss the design or the various modes, which include puzzle, time-attack and endless modes, but honestly it doesn't matter. You will just play the standard mode anyway. I will just note that PopCap's arbitrary enforcement of "levels," whereby hitting a certain score sends you down a psychedelic wormhole and refreshes the board, is a critical part of Bejeweled's insistent, artless charm. This is no purist test like Tetris; it's a machine for making you feel good.

Should you play Bejeweled 2 or 3? This is a tough one. Bejeweled 3, from 2010, is objectively the better game. It has crisp HD visuals that look good on a modern screen, more game modes, more gem types, a better progression and reward structure (by which I mean it has one), and is tuned to be easier and more gratifying, which in the case of Bejeweled is a good thing.

But, aesthetically, it's a bit off — a bit too far removed from Bejeweled's turn-of-the-millennium moment to work. The music is too strident; the backgrounds are bland rather than gloriously naff. Bejeweled 2, from 2005, is primitive and fuzzy by comparison, but the vibes are immaculate. The swooshing futurism of the soundtrack would make Jean-Michel Jarre proud; behind the field of play, there's a grainy image of space mountains, with a ringworld curving up into the sky.

It was a simpler time, when the internet was exciting, when a console storefront like Xbox Live Arcade was a distinct, curated space, and when buying games digitally was thrillingly novel rather than a violation of our consumer rights. Travel back there now with Bejeweled, and match shiny colored shapes until your cares melt away.