Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To review: Tetris Chillax

Tetris Attack (and by extension, Panel de Pon) was one of my favorite games as a kid. The Yoshi theme was an obvious hook, but there was also something to the core gameplay that had an approachable appeal compared to other puzzle games. So when Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To showed up on Kickstarter a few years ago, a Panel de Pon-inspired puzzle joint with visual novel elements, developed by a co-op studio trying to enact some change in the industry to boot, I was paying attention.

The title is also the thing you do!

Spirit Swap follows Samar, a witch presiding in the friendly demon city of Demashq. Her job is cleaning up Spirits that bumble their way into the realm of the city, and for some reason they’re everywhere lately. In a brief, breezy story mode, Samar visits all her friends in the area, cleans up their Spirit messes, and figures out what the heck is going on. There’s a big concert around the corner, so hopefully things calm down by then.

To clean up Spirits, Samar has to swap them! That’s where the Panel de Pon gameplay kicks in, nice and straightforward. If you’ve played Tetris Attack, Panel de Pon, or Puzzle League, you’ll know what to expect here. The pieces have silly faces that get even sillier when you make a match and they “pop,” and there are various opportunities to make combos and fill up your opponent’s field with junk. There’s a competitive element suggesting everyone here knows how to swap Spirits, but I guess Samar is the best at it, hence doing it as a job. It justifies the two-player mode, so we probably aren’t supposed to think too much about it.

Can you relax too much?

There’s one gimmick in Spirit Swap, and that’s casting spells. As you meet characters and solve their problems you’ll get their spell, and you can equip up to three. You can cast a spell by building a meter, then arranging pieces in a specific way, such as a 2x2 block or a diamond shape. These are neat, but don’t make a huge difference, especially if you’re decent at setting up combos.

If the “Lofi” part of the title was any indication, though, there isn’t a lot of intensity to Spirit Swap. This puzzle game is inherently competitive, but Spirit Swap wants you to relax and have a good time. There are difficulty options and of course non-story play if you want to challenge yourself, but on the other end of the spectrum you can simply skip a stage in the story if you’re having trouble. That’s fine, but I think there’s also a lack of intensity to the action itself, with very little impact to things like achieving combos, casting a spell, clearing junk pieces, and so on and so forth. There’s some UI activity and you get a time freeze to try and set up more combos, but there’s no screen-shaking, dramatic SFX, anything you might expect from a puzzle game to gas you up when you’re doing well.

Romance on the side

All that isn’t to suggest Spirit Swap doesn’t have any sauce or style; it has a lot! The characters in particular are loud, colorful, and fun to interact with. The story mode is breezy though, sticking around just long enough to introduce everyone, drop hints at the kind of world they inhabit, drop a silly gag of an ending then roll credits. The game does a weird thing afterwards, letting you hop back in after the story is over to keep interacting with the characters and develop relationships with them. It’s off-putting that these elements aren’t woven into the story, and makes the romance stuff feel kind of shallow and pointless. That especially holds true when you can just go through each character, romance everyone, then just have the game hanging in stasis promising more content in updates.

Ultimately I enjoyed my time with Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To, due to its colorful visuals, relaxing soundtrack from Meltycanon, and familiar puzzle gameplay. But the overall experience feels just a little too breezy to make a lasting impact. The writing is cute but shallow, and the puzzle action feels like it’s barely interested in being there. The vibes are pleasant, but I feel like I’m left wanting for more substance. A little more pizazz to the gameplay or depth to the storytelling, and we’d have something special here.

Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is available on February 3, 2025 for the PC. A code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.