Royal Pain in the Match

Why I won’t ever play the popular free game “Royal Match”.

WARNING: this gets a bit dark and deeply unpleasant, and may be triggering.

Save the king in Royal Match puzzle game before he DROWNS!

I hate that sniveling grotesque quaking king in the game ads. The sound of his quivering warbling fear disgusts me.

Other people apparently have fun saving him, but I just want the fucker to hurry up and die. Drown, get eaten by the snake, burn yourself up … I fucking hate him. I hate seeing him, I hate hearing him, and nothing about him makes me want to play that game.

I don't think I realized how much the Royal Match King in the ads upsets me until I was making temporary friends with someone on a cross-country train ride. We were talking about apps and games we enjoy, and she brought up Royal Match. I could see the look of horror on her face as I suddenly morphed into a raging spitting bitch, declaring how much I hate The King. I know my entire visage melted into monstrous ugliness as I expressed my vehement disgust with this cartoon character guy that apparently other people think is cute?

This guy is not worth saving, let alone hurrying to help him.

I say this as someone who loves a lot of match3 games (obviously, if I’ve seen so many Royal Match ads that I’m this annoyed by the king in peril - I’ve got to be seeing these ads for the game somewhere).

Writing this post made me google a bit about the Royal Match game. I quickly found out via this post at OldCynic.com that the king-in-peril isn’t actually featured all that much in the game at all! He says,

… the Royal Match app is just like the ads; in that you can rescue the King! But, it’s rare. It’s only on Special levels called the King’s Nightmare.

The old cynic goes on to say that you can even SKIP the save-the-king levels. Phew!

So having read that, do I now want to install and play Royal Match to fuel my match 3 game addiction knowing I do not actually have to see or hear the inept King moron?

NOPE.

Because I don’t just hate the king. In fact, I think the whole entire game is UGLY.

Yup ... even a droopy-brained dog is better at chess than the nose-picking king.

The colors are ugly. The shapes are ugly. The whole look of the Royal Match game is gross and depressing. Compared to other popular match3 puzzle games like Candy Crush, Bejeweled Blitz, and Empires and Puzzles, the design and the sounds are just fucking ugly. Nothing about it is cute or dazzlingly-illuminated or joyful.

I think one of the main problems I have with the game that is not about aesthetics is the message to “HURRY UP”. Hurry up and save this incompetent man with a lazy face who clearly doesn’t even possess a sense of urgency to suck up his own drool in time before it falls and drips down his royal vestments. Have empathy for this king who doesn’t deserve his throne and is going to get the whole kingdom in trouble. I don’t want to be told in ugly bubble letter words to hurry when I’m relaxing, and I don’t want to think about a story where I’m supposed to empathize with anyone, let alone this swollen-lipped stooge. That is not a fun escape (for me, anyway).

Telling me to HURRY UP to save this dumb shit motherfucker doesn't sound relaxing.
Just drown already and let me play a game that is actually pleasurable.

It’s possible that the ads are the problem, not the game itself, and they’re just pitching it to people who are not at all like I am. But of course I wouldn’t know, because the ads are so extremely off-putting to me I will never ever try this game even though it’s possible I might actually enjoy it. I am a person who cannot even bear to have photos of people I love on my desk or hanging on my walls because it’s so stressful and distracting and confrontational, seeing faces and smiles and eye contact. Even when it’s just a flat static image and not an actual human. Like what do you want from me now?!? Oh my god you’ve got feelings on your faces and I’ve got to do something about your feelings and respond to them and I am sure to fail can I not just concentrate on my work for a while? Please leave me the fuck alone with my naturally-flat facial affect!! Who the fuck let you in here?!?

Seriously, the king is almost like my fucked-up stepdad and I’m being told how bad I make him feel by not being more loving towards him. “Help me! Help me!” It’s gross and terrible. I don’t want to save him or be more loving, I just want him to fucking disappear and never open the bathroom door on me again when I’m on the toilet or naked on the precipice of showering.

Royal Match doesn’t look or sound like a charming addictive pleasurable escape into a rainbow bright grid of sweet electric magic with music and sound effects carrying you along on a rewarding easy magic carpet ride. Instead it looks like a second-hand dungeon of seventies furniture. It’s so ugly you can almost smell the mustard and brown plaid couches with the king leaking stale fried chicken and gravy out of his royal ass in a nightmare that takes place at the sadly-run-down Excalibur hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Royal Match seems like a free buffet in a dingy basement with diarrhea dripping down the walls mixed with the smell of watery overheated green beans all mushing around out of a can, where every metal tub of food reeks of e coli and salmonella and is served by greasy-haired minions wearing unruly sticky comb-overs and filthy aprons with shit under their fingernails.

In the nightmare that is Royal Match’s buffet of kingly peril, you’re invited to load up your plates trying not to slip and crack your head open on cheap steaming moist tiles grouted together with black mold and feces before you try to choke down this absolutely diseased blended-squash-and-rotten-liquified-meat-and-green-peas mush, on the verge of vomiting but being forced to try to swallow it as fast as you can in an act of fealty to this worthless thumb-sucking motherfucker the king.

All the while the king is stuffing his face at the head table making the most pathetic obscene noises as his gastrointestinal distress increases and threatens to explode in a b-movie’s special effects version of a burst colon. What, is he about to cry now? Snot dripping down into his smelly-ass thick facial hair where it will congeal and broadcast an aroma of rotten teeth and stale man-breath?

It’s deeply unpleasant how writing this made me realize how much the king in this stupid game’s ads triggers a morass of extremely yucky feelings about my stepdad. I never made the connection before, but I can see now that it stirs up so many conflicted distressing messages and feelings I received as a child and teen, and memories of actually empathizing WAY TOO MUCH with people like my stepdad who were big gross self-serving unhinged babies and not to be trusted or forced to live with.

I just want to put this nasty bug-eyed fucker out of his misery. The king is beyond saving. I’ll play almost any match 3 game but not this one. I don’t care if it doesn’t have ads. You’d have to pay ME to put up with grotesque nightmare of unfun.