Bejeweled was not the first match-3 game to hit the market (that was Shariki) - it was mainly just the most popular. Featuring a board of games where the player can swap gems on the board to get three in a row (or more), the game excels at providing cute sound effects and the feeling of a chain reaction where multiple matches go off at once.

That said, the addictive qualities wear off surprisingly quickly, and the player finds themselves in a randomly generated hidden object game where their brains turn to much from gazing at a stack of gems to inevitably fail. There's a time trial to keep things snappy, but it's a death march from start to finish when the player runs out of gems.

Being that this was the first game to do so, I compared it to its more modern counterpart (Bejeweled: Classic) and I got more of the same. No fantasy vistas, relaxing music, or tweakable zen options could get around the fact that this game gets boring incredibly quickly and there's not much interest after five minutes.

Bejeweled is the type of game that requires constant small playthroughs of a few minutes to keep things interesting or a massive amount of patience. Even with modern tweaks or pretty gems or fun chain reactions, this game is remarkably dull.