One of the most interesting trends in game design is the use of familiar mechanics and genres to explore real-world power systems and how to challenge them. Forthcoming deck-building game, All Will Rise, seeks to interest players in political activism, Compensation Not Guaranteed aims to educate players about south-east Asian politics, while MythMatch is ostensibly a puzzle game set in ancient Greece, but is also about building communities and challenging capitalism – while still looking cute and approachable.
You play as Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who is having to navigate the institutionalised sexism of Mount Olympus, here represented as a corporation infested with tech bros. In defiance, she decides to help the mortals of Ithaca build a new, more progressive world – and you do this by running around the little environments, merging items and animals to create helpful new beasts and objects. For example, when you’re cast down to Earth you accidentally smash a chariot belonging to Selene, the goddess of the Moon, so you have to match moon shards together to recreate the celestial vehicle. However, one of the shards has fallen into a greenhouse, so you need to solve a puzzle to gain access.
The game then is part narrative adventure, part social sim, part match-three teaser. “We ended up taking a lot more from automation games like Factorio, but where the automation happens through connection with the NPCs rather than building machinery,” says Moo Yu, founder and creative director at developer Team Artichoke. “And in Mount Olympus, we’re inspired by various arcade-style games like Money Puzzle Exchanger, Overcooked, and even Super Auto Pets.”
With a diverse bunch of characters and a genuinely funny script, the emphasis is very much on forming friendships and a pleasant community. “I became obsessed with the theme of belonging,” says Yu. “As someone who has always struggled to make friends or find community, I just felt like there weren’t enough games about rejection and found family. So I started with some gameplay about moving goalposts and constantly being rejected by the gods of Olympus. Then when searching for where Artemis might actually fit in, I thought about some of the communities that I love and how they are about aligning our commonalities while embracing our differences.”
Team Artichoke is a small studio with 10 staff, most of whom are working part-time on the project. At the helm, Yu is a veteran who’s worked at Media Molecule and Mind Candy as well as co-developing the hit adventure Knights and Bikes. When asked about the key influences behind Mythmatch, he immediately cites three films: Kung Fu Panda, Amelie and most prominently Legally Blonde, the Reese Witherspoon comedy which is visually coded to look like a romcom but also deftly analyses misogyny in the legal profession. “We wanted to create a caricatured world to give us the breathing space to venture on to more serious topics,” he says. “[There’s] a surface cuteness but with a layer of grittiness throughout. So while the game might not literally look like the world of Legally Blonde, we wanted to capture the space created by the exaggerated colour palette while also making sure there was a layer of messiness as well.”
So while Mythmatch uses the core game loops of casual genres such as match-three and merge games, it has a fundamental message to impart about power and belonging. Yu sees this combination as important in the indie games scene of 2025. “I’m seeing more small games that are delivering new stories or pairing mechanics with interesting narratives that I think speaks to what creativity can accomplish with limited funds,” he says. “I wish the funds weren’t getting more and more limited, but I am always inspired by what people can accomplish with what they can scrape together.”
