Our friend and guru Match 3 player Kathy Lew (SynthpopAddict) wrote this guide for our game Spooky Dwellers 3. Enjoy!
General tips:
-The gears button in the main screen is for customizing the basic display details and audio. But the real treasure trove of customization is the Menu button in the game levels. Check out the Menu button in a level screen and get everything set up however you’d like. You can change the game options at any time by returning to the Menu button.
-The Levels and Minigames buttons which appear after clicking the Menu button allow you to replay any unlocked level on demand.
-The Help button in the levels screen stores all the in-game help popup texts for quick reference.
-The Skip button charges rapidly and will skip the M3 level in progress once it’s fully charged, however this installment of Spooky Dwellers, much like the previous ones, can be figured out if you mess with the levels long enough. But just in case…
-The Reset button restarts the level.
-The X button quits the level, but your progress will not be saved.
-The object of every level is to remove all the Spooky Dwellers, which will be hanging out somewhere on the edges of most levels by directing the light(s) so the light shines on the Dwellers. In the CE levels, some Spooky Dwellers will be found inside the playfields and have to be removed by matching next to them enough. If you happen to remove at least half or all of the pumpkins in the board, you’ll win either a silver or gold trophy. The pumpkins are usually in the way of the light(s), so you’ll most likely earn a silver trophy at least in the majority of levels.
-When there is fog covering playing tiles, you can drag on playing tiles under the fog to temporarily pull them up to see what they are. Light will shine through fog if it is just a regular playing tile hiding beneath the fog, but if it’s something else, the light will be blocked. Matching next to a pumpkin hidden by fog will remove the pumpkin, but this trick doesn’t work for getting a jump on breaking black rocks. The black rocks must first be uncovered, then matched next to two more times.
-The magnifying glass will only show you Spooky Dwellers and grass tiles remaining which are not obscured by fog or bushes. So if the level doesn’t want to complete, it’s because you have something hiding under fog or bushes.
-Chains: Only require one match to break, even though there are 2 chains around a chained piece, so not as intimidating as they look. Curiously, chains block light from passing through.
-If you have completed the first 90 levels, pressing the Play button in the opening screen will take you back to level 1. To get to the CE bonus levels, you have to go to the CE Bonuses and pick the extra levels from there. Even if you’ve left off somewhere in the CE bonus levels, you must still go to the CE Bonuses to access where you’ve left off upon, not the Play button.
-Expert mode: Is a SERIOUS challenge. You’ve been warned! You need more than a little luck to get gold in many cases. It is possible to play sans powerups and get gold in expert limited moves, but be prepared to replay levels often. Expert timed mode is particularly soul-destroying and I don’t think it’s possible without using the powerups constantly (and you still have to get pretty lucky).
Scene (Playground) building:
Unlike the earlier games and some of the other IKIGames releases where you were building a complex, infinitely customizable scene in between levels, the Playground you are tasked to build here, while still quite customizable if you keep going long enough, is actually for you to fulfill Tomassino’s request of re-housing the Spooky Dwellers. Because of this, you’re pretty limited in what you can build until all the Dwellers have been unlocked and have found homes. I’m a completionist, so I “do everything”, but I’d guess you could skip over building the Playground entirely. Although in that case, I wonder if Tomassino will simply never tell you the ghosts have all gotten new homes, or maybe he’ll scold you eventually?
It was my experience that getting all the assorted types of Spooky Dwellers unlocked and setting up the living arrangements for them takes most or all of the SE content to do, including playing all the minigames, in order to get enough funds. Once the CE M3 levels unlock, the Playground expands about 30% in size. I didn’t play any of the CE content until I’d finished all the SE M3 levels and SE minigames, but the CE minigames unlock after two-thirds of the way through the SE M3 levels if you want to really bump up your gold stash in a hurry. If you play all the CE minigames, you’ll have an enormous amount of gold and can pretty much buy anything you’d like.
You must house at least the minimum number listed of the assorted Spooky Dwellers to fulfill Tomassino’s request. You’ll win the Golden Afro trophy for doing so.
There’s plenty of help on using the Playground controls if you check out the buttons at the top right, plus you get several popups explaining things when you first go into the Playground.
Tomassino’s Playground Missions (and useful housing tips):
When you first enter the Playground, Tomassino has a list of “missions” to accomplish. Most of these are tutorials in disguise, but a few were made a tad trickier to figure out. The Missions screen is open by default, but you can close it by clicking the X. The green button with a number at the top right of the closed Missions button shows you how many Missions are left to complete. Click Tomassino’s picture in the Playground to reopen the Missions screen and view the current Mission in progress.
You win more gold coins for completing each mission, so these can actually all be accomplished pretty rapidly. I always get them all done before level 5.
The missions in order are:
1: Place a portal into the Playground. Tip: Portals have a bar which charges at the top. When the bar is full, a Spooky Dweller appears if there is also a road for it to walk upon.
2: Put a house into the Playground. Tip: Your cumulative housing capacity is displayed below your gold coin amount. To fulfill Tomassino’s request of housing enough Spooky Dwellers, your housing capacity needs to be at least 77 by the end of the game for the CE version and at least 50 if you’ve got the SE.
3: Build a road connecting the portal to the house.
4: Place a cauldron into the Playground. Tip: I’ve found you don’t really need more than about 2 cauldrons ever, as the speedup to the portals is pretty significant especially if you have a big cauldron installed. If you have a big cauldron, a small cauldron, and 2 portals, Spooky Dwellers will be coming out about every 5 seconds, which is faster than you’ve probably got housing for. I used a small cauldron and 1 portal only for a good part of the game.
5: Wait until the portal generates a Spooky Dweller, then let it walk into a house. Tip: This may have already occurred, but it won’t count until Mission 5 has appeared and you let a Dweller walk into a house again.
6: Click on a house to view the dialog on how many Dwellers are living inside. This trick is useful as you’ll want to periodically monitor your houses’ occupancy rates. Tip: If a house is full, either move it away from the road so you can build a new one by the road, or remove the road to the full house. Otherwise, the Spooky Dwellers coming from the portal will have nowhere to go and will simply disappear, “wasting” them.
7: Hover the cursor over the types of Spooky Dwellers at the top of the Playground scene. This displays the requirements for unlocking each type of Spooky Dweller (object types and number required to be built). When you have satisfied the requirement for that Dweller, its picture turns green and that type of Dweller will be generated at the portal(s) at least until enough of that Dweller is housed. If you have not unlocked a Dweller type, it will not appear at the portal and you won’t be able to win the Golden Afro trophy. Tip: The red numbers to the left of the Dweller icons show your progress towards the Golden Afro trophy.
8: Put a rock into the Playground. Rocks are in the “tree” section of the “store”.
9: This one awards you more gold because it’s a bit of a riddle. If you can’t figure it out, go to the “barrel” section of the “store” and install the sign which has Tomassino’s face into the Playground.
10: Buy something from the “store”, but right-click the item at least once before dropping it into place on the Playground. Tip: Right-clicking on an already-placed object will lift it back up for you to move elsewhere but will not fulfill this mission. To satisfy the mission, it must be a brand new item you bought and then right-click to rotate before placement.
11: Buy a pumpkin and install it in the Playground.
12: Buy a fence piece and put it somewhere in the Playground. Fencing off the perimeter of the Playground is an easy way to get the fencing requirement fulfilled for the 2 Spooky Dwellers calling for fencing (and a lot of it).
13: Click the mace icon and use it to delete something. Tips: This will also subtract from the tally of objects needed for unlocking the Spooky Dweller types, so use the gold coins you gain back from deleting something to put the item back. Try not to delete a house which is occupied, because I think that also takes away the Dwellers inside and sets you back on the number of Dwellers which are housed.
14: Either slide the magnifying glass icon to the right, or click the + sign to zoom in.
15: Slide the magnifying glass to the left or click the – sign to zoom out.
16: Click the “Change View” button 3 times. This also shows you all the different viewing options for the Playground. I usually use “top down” while building, to see the available spaces remaining better.
17: Drag the cursor around in the Playground to move the scene, then release the mouse button.
18: Buy the house which costs 3000 gold and put it into the Playground. Tip: Even if you’re like me and have already done this a few times to get your housing capacity up as fast as possible, you have to buy a new 7-Dweller house when this mission appears before it works.
19: I don’t know if buying just any tree works, but the one which I use for this goal is the small group of trees in the far right of the “tree” options costing 800 gold.
20: Buy a coffin, not a tombstone, from the “pumpkin” section of the “store” and put it in the Playground.
Completing all 20 missions gives you a golden Tomassino medal at the top of the Playground screen.
In order to get the assorted Spooky Dweller types unlocked the fastest, you’ll have to buy the cheapest things available and pile them up around your houses and roads, which makes for a really ugly scene full of buckets, piles of leaves, and pumpkins littering the Playground for a good part of the game. Then buy a second portal and another cauldron or 2 to really speed things up. If you spend a bit of time each time you’re in the Playground watching the portals generate Dwellers, it’s possible to fulfill Tomassino’s request and win that Golden Afro well before level 90, so long as you don’t mind the seriously ugly looking Playground!
Once you win the Golden Afro, all the portals automatically shut down and will be there for decoration only. Sometimes I wish the Dwellers would come back out of their houses and wander on the roads like they did in the previous game and then go back into the houses every so often, but I’m quite sure this would have been a programming nightmare to accomplish.
Minigames: In most cases,the Hint button is the magnifying glass icon. The question mark is the instructions, and the rotating arrows is the reset button. The X skips/closes the minigame.
HOS: Solving without using the Hint button awards you an additional 1000 gold. You don’t need to worry about misclicking; so long as you don’t use the Hint button you’ll get the extra gold. And yes, the fish are back, even if you’re not tasked to find them all the time! (Check out the 10th Corpse walkthrough for the history behind the fish if you want a laugh.)
Rotating Horror Discs: These jigsaw puzzle variants may appear to be a “horror” to solve without using hints, but if you look at one of the larger fragments and then figure out which set of buttons at the bottom moves that fragment, you can then use the image displayed in said larger fragment as a reference point, which makes these a lot easier. The idea is to rotate the 3 different sets of fragments until the full image is revealed. You win extra gold for solving without using hints. Tip: When you get the bat image, remember which way bats roost.
Skull Maze: Use your mouse to move Tomassino around the maze. Out of curiosity, I tried the arrow buttons on my keyboard, and they don’t work at all! To get a “perfect” which awards you an extra 2000 gold, you must pick up every gold coin, key, and gem in the maze before exiting at the green arrow. This will require you to wander over the whole maze. The numbers at the top tell you how many of each are obtained/present in the maze.
CE Sequence Finder: Find the matching tiles adjacent to each other in the board and click them in order to complete the “sequence” until you’ve done all the sequences. Many of these levels have a hidden tile in the middle of the sequence. You’ll have to figure out what the sequence is by trial and error, as there are often 2 or more possibilities, but only 1 sequence works. Misclicking doesn’t ding you any coins, but using a hint does. As long as you don’t use hints, you’ll get the 1000 bonus coins for a “flawless victory” even if you misclicked a sequence somewhere.
CE Arkadiusz Boxtrap: A stationary form of Tetris. Right click on the pieces appearing on the right to rotate them. Otherwise, drag on a piece to pick it up, then drop it somewhere in the grid. You can’t pick the pieces back up once they’ve been dropped into the grid. The idea is to form a box at least 3×3 squares where the box includes a skull to remove the skull, and remove all the skulls from the grid by boxing them all. Sometimes it’s best to just make boxes in open areas to free up room for placing pieces over skulls. If there are skulls just a few squares apart, you can build a bigger box and get more than one skull.
CE The Coin Collector: A bounce-to-hit sort of game where you aim the skulls at coins and bombs at the tombstones to blow up the tombstones. If a bomb touches some coins along the way, it will pick up the coins, but it only explodes on a tombstone. Landing a skull in a cauldron or hitting a balloon with a skull awards you extra coins. Try to remove all the coins from the playfield for a “perfect” bonus of 1000 extra coins.
Tips for the lockable M3 levels:
Level 31: Don’t move the arrow block until the unlit talisman in the top left corner has been lighted.
Level 48:
1) Remove the pumpkins on the left side so the unlit talisman in the top left corner lights.
2) Remove the black rock in the center which is blocking the center arrow block, then slide the arrow block.
3) Clear the pumpkins in the way of the light so the unlit talisman on the bottom lights.
4) Get rid of the remaining pumpkins and black rocks blocking the light. Move the arrow block out of the way.
Level 50: Move the arrow block from the right side first, then the arrow block from the top left corner. Don’t remove the black rocks holding up the hammers until you’ve removed the black rocks from the bottom; otherwise, the hammers will get in the way.
Level 54: “Save the Black Rocks”.
1) Slide the arrow block from the right over to the black rock in the center. Don’t break the rock.
2) Remove the pumpkins blocking the light so the talisman in the bottom right corner lights.
3) Slide the arrow block up from the bottom.
4) Now remove the black rock next to the arrow block (blocking the light) so the arrow block can be moved over to the next black rock. Leave this rock in place if you can. If it gets broken, do not move the arrow block!
5) Remove the black rock blocking the arrow block on the left so the arrow block can be moved out of the way of the light and smash the remaining pumpkins.
Level 68: Make sure all the black rocks are gone from the singleton spaces at the bottom before moving the arrow blocks.
Level 102: Make sure you clear the grass tiles on the left and right edges before sliding the arrow blocks.
Level 111: Get rid of the black rock on the top row and move the hammers down so the talisman in the top right corner lights before moving the arrow block up from the bottom.
Level 112: Leave the arrow block alone until the talisman in the bottom left corner is lit. You’ll be clearing almost everything else off the playfield before this happens.
Level 122: This level isn’t lockable, but that one bedbug on the bottom conveyor belt always throws me. You have to match on the belt in the far right column to move the bedbug up into the right side to reach it.
Level 146:
1) Remove all the pumpkins on the right half of the playfield (some are hiding in the bottom right). Lower the hammer to break the rock.
2) Work your way over to the top left with clearing the pumpkins.
3) Uncover the 2 lights – one is in the top left corner and the other is 2 spaces below it. Remove the pumpkins in the way of the top left corner light so the unlit talisman in the top right lights up.
4) For the light 2 spaces below the top left corner, remove the pumpkins in its way so the light snakes around in the left and eventually gets blocked by the arrow block.
5) Uncover the key hiding in the fog at the bottom left while clearing the last pumpkins. Move the arrow block up out of the way.
Level 147: It’s not lockable, but you have to get the pipe all the way to the end of the conveyor belt at the top right before the light will get to the Spooky Dweller at the top left.