Matchic (Commodore Amiga)

Matchic for the Commodore Amiga is a game that I would be comfortable to say held the title of ‘Rarest Commercial Amiga Game’ for almost 30 years, having only sold 3 copies back in 1991 before it’s publisher at the time ceased operating. However, Psytronik Software look to change all this when they agreed to give the game a proper commercial release and re-published the game in 2020.

Matchic is a match style puzzle game, inspired by the game Puzznic, offering 50 levels for you to complete. The controls are quite straight forward. Using a mouse device, left clicking a square piece moves it to the left by one space while right clicking moves it to the right. If you hold the mouse button down while moving the hand cursor, you can drag pieces along as well. One thing to note is that you cannot move a piece that has another piece stack on top of it.

To the left side you will see the number of pieces from each colour that need to be matched and you have to clear all the pieces before the timer expires. If you put yourself in a position by where you are not able to complete a level, the game’s colour scheme switches to grey and you have no choice but to wait for the timer to expire, which itself can be accelerated by holding down both mouse buttons. Each time the timer expires you lose one of your 3 available lives.

A game piece counter is located in the lower left area of the screen, letting you know the remaining number of pieces. Should you end up with only one of a certain type of piece, the level will become unsolvable and the screen display will fade to grey. You can still try to dissolve some remaining pieces to get a higher score, but the lack of colours may make this more difficult so you may just want to hold down both the left and right mouse buttons to accelerated the countdown timer.

After clearing certain levels, you will be shown a password, which can be used from the main title screen to automatically advance past most of the levels you have already completed.

Matchic contains the provision for add-on DLCs to be purchased in the future but the likliehood of this coming into fruition will be low and should pretty much be discarded.

One important thing to note is that Matchic is designed for Amiga computers with 512K and as such the game has a bug in that the countdown timer expires at a faster rate on faster Amiga computers. 

Setting aside this one issue, Matchic provides a decent puzzle gaming experience. There is nothing particularly outstanding about the game but it provides a solid game for fans of match style games.

Link: Psytronik Software’s Matchic news page

Check out a video show case of the game below.