Dialoop review – match-three puzzling goes rogue
Nick Gillett Published June 18, 2026 1:00am
A new match-three puzzler doesn't sound like much to get excited about, but this low budget Nintendo Switch indie title has an interesting twist on the usual formula.
In the mid-1990s, in the full flush of PlayStation's early success, Sony released Net Yaroze, a super low cost development kit designed to appeal to start-up indie studios and game programming hobbyists. This was long before Unity and Godot, at a time when making console games was the exclusive preserve of larger companies, and as an initiative it felt genuinely revolutionary, giving small-time developers access to the burgeoning PlayStation userbase. As a player, it meant there was a sudden influx of delightfully experimental, often budget priced, games.
That sudden gush of offbeat creativity hasn't really persisted through the generations. These days the margins of the PSN Store are full of dreadful shovelware and hastily tacked together knock-offs, and the earlier spirit of anarchic invention has largely departed for mobile, but there are still console releases that embody those inspiringly chaotic sensibilities.
Released earlier this year, and to little fanfare on PC, Dialoop -The Roguelite Puzzle- is now available for Switch, where its wonderfully peculiar single screen delights are well suited to brief sessions wherever you happen to be.
Featuring intentionally blocky, Minecraft-esque heroes that include Robin Hood, Ishikawa Goemon (a similar figure from Japanese legend and the basis of the Ganbare Goemon games), and Lana (a female adventurer who is similar to but legally distinct from Lara Croft), its gameplay revolves around match-three puzzling.
In the game's unusual take on the genre, you can grab and drag any coloured square on the board, moving rows and columns as often and as far as you like, with no time limit. You can also abandon any single move at any time with no penalty, letting you noodle about ad nauseam, experimenting with different combinations of pushes and pulls to line-up as many combos as possible. The only limit is the number of turns you get.
Your goal in each level is to beat a predefined score, and naturally that increases as you progress, as you rely on bigger combos and score bonuses to reach it before your turns run out. You're assisted in that process by relics, the game's nod in the direction of deck building, which you purchase in a shop that pops up between rounds, using coins earned by making matches.
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Relics have all sorts of effects, from adding more of one particular type of tile, to buffing a particular colour's score, to increasing your multiplier when certain conditions are met. Each one slightly changes the emphasis of play, either by making one colour increasingly high scoring, by encouraging you to make smaller combos, or rewarding you for matching a specific number of tiles at a time. While they do stack, few effects multiply together, so as you progress through its roguelike levels your scores rise, but not exponentially, as it can in Balatro or Ball X Pit. It makes for a rapidly increasing challenge, which is partly mitigated by unlocking new heroes for your roster, each of whom comes with his or her own bonus or special ability.
Each hero also has a story, although unlike Hades and its ilk, that story is static, getting retold in exactly the same way each play through, with no evolution between runs. That means the first time you read each one, its amusingly bizarre content is a fun distraction, but of little interest on subsequent runs until you get to new story beats by progressing further than you've previously managed.
There are also blocky bosses to fight, all of whom have a special power, which again subtly subverts your usual tactics, forcing you to finish in fewer turns, or eliminate a particular type of special tile from your grid. You can also play in multiplayer against up to seven other people, although you will need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription for that, and a bit of luck finding enough concurrent opponents.
The other thing worth mentioning is the sound design, which layers on a new chord for each line of three or more you set up. It gives an immediate reference point as you're tinkering with each move, letting you know what's going on without having to watch every single part of the board. As those choral notes come and go, you can hear lines being made or broken, the feedback proving invaluable as you're testing combinations of moves.
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Dialoop's twist on match-three gives you total freedom to experiment and no time limit for each turn, meaning you can spend as long as you like playing around with patterns to maximise matches and combos. It's a process that doesn't feel as though it has much to do with the skill, the extreme spatial reasoning needed to picture different positions after you mix up both rows and columns, proving way too much. The counter to that is that you do soon start to score a lot higher than when you started out, so clearly some sort of subliminal learning must be taking place.
With its weird heroes and their equally strange stories, whacky sound effects, and distinctive take on a genre that's been popular for decades, Dialoop is a little breath of fresh air. Its stat boosting relics may not stack as satisfyingly as Balatro, and its narrative may not have the long term coherence of Hades, but its idiosyncratic time wasting abilities and generously low price are a welcome aside for Switch owners.
Dialoop review summary
In Short: Dialoop's roguelite structure and unorthodox take on match-three puzzling make it a pleasingly original oddity, even if it lacks the depth and refinement of some other deck builders.
Pros: Interesting twist on match-three puzzling and a structure well suited to portable play on Switch. Great sound design and amusing heroes, each of whom has their own left field adventure.
Cons: Each hero's story is the same every run. Many buff-conferring relics feel underpowered and chaining combos can feel more like good fortune than skill.
Score: 7/10
Formats: Nintendo Switch (reviewed) and PC
Price: £6.69
Publisher: Byking
Developer: Viking
Release Date: 18th June 2026
Age Rating: 7
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