It took me at least 40 minutes to figure out what the hell was happening on-screen when I started playing Monsters Ate My Condo. It’s not that this match-three puzzle game is all that difficult to understand. And it isn’t the frenetic pacing, nor the panic found when you can’t balance your way out of a seismically unstable stack of blocky domiciles.

My bewilderment was mostly a result of the colorful sensory-overload madness of it all, as flashing lights, combo meters, and animated text chaotically cluttered the screen. The obvious Japanese pop-cultural associations are alive and well here, aped by a New Zealand developer to utterly psychotic perfection.

Monsters Ate My Condo is a very hard game to put down. The idea is simple: two colored monsters flank either side of a stack of randomly-selected condos -- and they must be fed. Feed a condo to a monster that corresponds to its color and your score goes up. Monsters can eat other colored buildings as well, but after so many wrong matches, the Godzilla-like beasts throw a fit that’ll rock the foundation of your condo structure. Matching three starts a combo chain, but sudden movements, bombs, or any other disturbance that knocks your structure over ends the game. It’s like Tetris meets Jenga, only with cartoony, 50-story-tall mutants.

Outside of basic game mechanics, though, the insanity also adds its own addictive charm. Condo blocks are affected by individual physics, which can make the fast pace rather manic; and the monsters are well animated, with goofy personalities and an aesthetic that resembles a theoretical pairing of Peggle and the artwork of Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky.

The bottom line. The ridiculously busy visual nonsense is reason enough to keep playing -- but then there’s a great puzzle game underneath. Monsters Ate my Condo is Adult Swim’s best game yet.