It is a testament to how solid the Match 3 concept is that I persevered and finished this game because the programmers weren't great at their jobs.
In between stages there are some story bits and journal bits... the journal bits sometimes give you a page you aren't supposed to have yet, and then if you try to go back and read previous entries it removes it. Thankfully by the end of each chapter it seems to all be there but it is a bit silly.
The gameplay itself mostly works, but there are also some bug there in that sometimes it will give you the "No more moves!" message and reshuffle your tiles even when you very clearly have more moves available. Also when you make a match that causes other tiles to fall into a group of 4 or more, sometimes it only recognizes and clears 3 of them.
On to the good stuff. Story is good (it had better be, the book has been out for 150 years). The time limit for each level seems mostly fair. The powerups are quite fun, and you charge them by matching 4 or more tiles together. The stages have layouts that range from wide open to very constricting, and in a couple of them the only way to win is to charge up and use powerups to clear tiles you can't otherwise match. In most stages the goal is to get a certain number of object tiles to the bottom of the stage. They don't match to anything and are unaffected by powerups. Every so often you will have a stage where you have to pop a tile on every square of the board instead.
In your way are the layouts themselves; locked tiles which you can't move, and need to be first be popped once or twice to unlock them and then you can clear them; frozen tiles which are like locked tiles but worse because they won't fall if you pop tiles underneath them, so you can start to accumulate empty spaces until you can unfreeze the tiles; and rock floors which prevent your object tiles from falling off the bottom of the stage if they are in that column.
There is a level for every day of your journey around the world (although there are not story bits for every single day). So looking at at title you should infer that this game will take several hours to complete. Probably double digits - maybe 10 to 12 hours? Maybe longer.
Some of the levels are maddeningly frustrating - one of them had about 70% of the board frozen and you just had to get lucky with the remainder tiles and the reshuffle. Others were less hateful but still challenging. Luck of the tile draw makes a big difference because there were a few stages times I had to retry multiple times, and some of them I cleared in just a couple minutes on the winning try.
It seems like around 20% of DS titles are Match 3 puzzle games so you aren't hurting for options. If you are itching to play one, go put some ointment on. If you are still itching after that, see a doctor. You could do worse than this but I'm sure you could do better too.
