Green Sauce Games: Santa's Holiday Match 3
I have played several of this developer's games during lockdown.
This one is seasonally themed, with pleasantly light, slightly jazzy music. Not littered with usual festive favourites and music can be turned off if you get seasonal overload!
Style: Match3 with simple storyline. Story not too intrusive. Lots of tricky objectives, big range of obstacles and hidden areas.
Premise: Santa takes a holiday, you save Xmas.
Difficulty: good range of permutations - play your profile multiple times with different gaming choices, timed or not, limited moves, casual/expert (less time/fewer moves).
Special new feature: Black holes can spawn items both helpful and unhelpful
Verdict at 20% completed: Enjoyable, difficulty levels to suit all, great selection of destructive noises, smooth gameplay. Pretty snowscape backgrounds and fun decorations which can be moved about your room to suit your mood: I like the snowman next to the fire best, and who knows what will happen at the end if we shake the snow globe!
Harder than it looks: make sure to save some of your power-up arsenal for higher levels - funds are not unlimited! So an educational extra is you learn to budget... Make sure you note the goals at the top of the screen so as not to waste moves!
PS Tutorial can be toggled on or off in Options - just as well, my game manual turns out to be in Dutch, even though I have US English ticked in Options, oops. Hopefully Green Sauce will read this and tweak.
PPS If this year's stop-start Xmas has put you off the seasonal theme, try FishWitch Halloween, with an underwater Caribbean flavour. It is possible to go through the whole game choosing only fish and crustaceans for your underwater paradise, if you prefer to mostly avoid Halloween, I know, I have :-).