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Xalavier Nelson Jr., the boss of indie studio Strange Scaffold, has overseen plenty of weird and wonderful games. From Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator to Clickolding to El Paso, Elsewhere and I Am Your Beast, you never know what he and the team are going to make next. Cue Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, the "match-3 survival horror comedy RPG metroidvania you didn't know you needed."
We caught up with Nelson Jr. at GDC to ask him the question on everyone's mind: why make a match-3 game in the year of our lord 2025?
"On a gameplay level I am deeply irritated or terrified, depending on the day, of RPG character creators" Nelson Jr. explains. "They ask you to put a bunch of points into things, and you have no idea how they'll be used or how it'll impact your journey into the game until I've sunk time into it. And as a tired adult, by the time I've sunk time into the game, it's too late to go back. So pulling from the tabletop RPG space [...] I saw an opportunity to have an RPG framework [where] if you do something weird like horking a book down your throat, we can call you feral, because what you did was feral, we can define you by your actions and give you options that align with the actions you've taken in the game, rather than an arbitrary skill check because you've put enough points into a stat."
That's a game system I can get behind. Maybe the reason I keep replaying Skyrim is because I know where my skill points are going, and you only level up the skills you use. I don't want to learn entirely new systems and have to spec into them or read huge build guides before every new RPG I play. As well as RPG elements, there's also a metroidvania part to the game, though.
"So how the metroidvania part comes in is as you play through the game and do scenarios and find alternate paths, you will find paths and options in these paths, locked by traits and items [which] you can only get by doing weird stuff throughout the mansion," Nelson Jr. tells us. "As you do weird stuff, it gives you more opportunity to do weird stuff throughout the rest of the game. It's not, 'now I can double-jump.' It's, 'I saw when I entered one dialogue, that there's a big door that can only be opened with a giant diamond, I have a giant diamond in my inventory now, maybe I should go in there.' And then you open a door into this weird wooden society that is dedicated to finding the one true version of a video game."
If you've ever played a Strange Scaffold game or seen any of Nelson Jr.'s social media posts, this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from him. If not, just trust me, it sounds like this will be a good game. It is a bit of a confusing mish-mash of genres though, and that did pose a problem.
"That was actually the topic of a meeting we had at the end of last year," Nelson Jr. says. "We had the kind of playtest results you would kill for – people loved the story, they loved the art, they thought the gameplay was engaging. However, they had no idea what they were playing."
The team had a meeting to figure out what on Earth they were actually making and settled on turning it into a metroidvania where "your actions and your exploration of the mansion create a non-linear structure that still told the story of the game, but broke up the content we'd already built in a more interesting and exploratory way," says Nelson Jr.. "And for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it meant I could call the game a 'match-roidvania', I said, 'yep, let's do that.'" And we've been making that, and the fact that it's connected with players, and people see not just the genre soup, but come out of it and say, 'I've never played a game quite like that before,' the soup makes sense. It's beyond our wildest dreams and it's something that makes us very grateful for the processes and the team approach that got us here in the first place."
Even though the team managed to get a cohesive game out of all this, it wasn't smooth sailing the whole time. "I've always wanted to make a game called [this] without having made 1 and 2," Nelson Jr. explains. "We spent years developing it. There's a couple different versions of it, none of them got funding. I was watching The Outer Wilds concert last year, feeling deep feelings because that soundtrack will bring you to that place, and I realized that this game that seemed like it had been killed by the industry at large provided a very unique opportunity.
"Because games usually take so long to build they don't have the ability to comment on themselves in real time. That's why often some of our parodies can feel very dated – it's because it took 3-5 years to build, so they're making fun of tropes that may not even be used anymore. So this game that had a highly flexible, match-3 and RPG framework, that could be built with the right support in less than a year, I realized could not just exist and deserve to exist, but had an opportunity to comment on the industry in real-time, as it lit itself on fire to the hurt of its players and its developers. FrostyPop, who has supported us on multiple projects, saw the potential in it, got behind it, and here we are."
I'm glad Nelson Jr. and Strange Scaffold get to put another strange game out into the world and can't wait to give it a go myself.
There's actually another match-3 genre fusion game I'm looking forward to. Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To is a match-3 and dating simulator that looks absolutely adorable and has a super fun demo. Check it out right here. You can also wishlist and try Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 right here.
In the meantime, check out all the upcoming video game release dates so you know what else is coming out this year.
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