If you’ve set a New Year’s resolution to whip your brain into better shape, nonogram puzzler Pictopix is a great place to start.

For the uninitiated, nonograms are a type of grid and number puzzle in which numbers or sequences of numbers aligned next to each row and column are used to decipher which cells to cross out and which cells to fill in, the ultimate goal being to reveal a hidden image that springs to life as colorful pixel art once solved. Pictopix doesn’t attempt any twists on these traditional rules, it simply presents a vanilla flavor of nonogram. Which is perfectly fine, because not every scoop of vanilla ice cream needs to be slathered with chocolate sauce or turned into a gluttonous sundae to be satisfying.

Tomlab Games lets the purity of balanced, thoughtful nonogram design speak for itself, matching impeccable puzzle logic with a clean and intuitive interface that works beautifully with mouse and keyboard or a controller. Left click colors in squares, right click crosses out squares to be left empty, and a middle scroll-wheel click can be used to place placeholder markers as erasable visual guides as you work through a puzzle. Squares can be filled in click by click, or you can click and drag to quickly paint large sections. Face buttons are used for the same functions with a controller.

On some of the larger puzzles, if you aren’t careful, it can be easy to stray out of a row or column and accidentally paint the wrong cells, like coloring outside the lines in a coloring book. However, a smart slide option can be toggled from the settings menu to lock the cursor onto the currently selected line for the duration of the held click. Even if you drag wildly beyond its boundaries, only cells in the selected row/column will color in. Smart slide isn’t needed for controller play, as moving the cursor up, down, left, and right is less likely to go astray while using analog sticks or the d-pad.

Pictopix contains 150 puzzles (plus a small batch of unlockable bonus puzzles), progressively building in size from small initial grids of 5×5 up to 10×10, 15×15, 20×20, and 25×25, as well as a few mixed sizes like 25×20 and 25×15. A puzzle editor is included as well, though currently Steam Workshop support for sharing custom grids has not yet been implemented (but is in the works). The base puzzles on their own offer immense value. Obviously playing time will vary from player to player based on individual puzzle-solving skill, but I’ve sunk nearly 30 hours into the game so far and have somewhere around 15 puzzles still to polish off, plus a bunch more to improve my score on. There’s a Shuffle mode too, but it really doesn’t add any extra value since it merely lets you play a randomized sequence of puzzles you’ve already completed or unlocked.

Puzzles are unlocked in order of size, so you’re required to go through the smaller puzzles in order to get to the larger ones. Each puzzle completed unlocks a new one, with up to 10 puzzles available to play at a given time. Start a puzzle and get stumped? No worries. The game comes with a suspend option so you can save your progress on one puzzle and move on to try another one without losing any of your work. As far as I can tell there is no limit to the number of puzzles you can have in simultaneous suspension, a nice advantage this game has over the equally excellent nonogram puzzler Paint It Back, which only allowed progress to be saved for one puzzle at a time.

In addition to an introductory tutorial that’s handy from the main menu for anyone in need of some early guidance, one of Pictopix‘s standout features is its adaptable difficulty scaling based on a set of optional hints. Hints include revealing a puzzle’s object category and color, highlighting rows and columns with solvable cells so you always know where to focus your attention, number fading to mark off numbers that are verified, and the ability to undo or redo moves. These hints can be turned on/off at varying levels based on a chosen difficulty preset–Novice (full hints), Intermediate (some hints), or Expert (no hints)–or manually toggled based on personal preference or need.

Determined by chosen difficulty and the number of errors committed, performance on each puzzle is rated on a scale of one to three awards. One award is given for completing a puzzle. Two awards are given for solving a puzzle without using any hints. The top three-award score is reserved only for expert players able to solve a puzzle without using hints while also making limited mistakes. The only problem with this setup is the lacking of a clear delineation between how many mistakes rule you out from earning three awards. It can be frustrating to sink a ton of time into no-hinting a puzzle and thinking that you’ve done well, not knowing that you’ve already made one too many errors to get the full score. At these moments I also noticed the lack of a ‘restart puzzle’ option from the completion recap screen. There are buttons to continue on to the next puzzle or quit back to the puzzle selection gallery, but no way to quickly restart the current puzzle on the spot. Hopefully that’s something that gets added in a future patch.

Something else I’d like to see changed is the way the game currently links changing of the background color in with the object theme hint. Playing with this hint turned on, each puzzle has its own background color so you get some variety. Without hints, though, every single puzzle plays out on the same grayish-blue background color scheme. Even though the presentation is very clean, attractive, and relaxing, it can also become monotonous for advanced players due to the unchanging palette. Different background colors really aren’t a hint, so I don’t quite understand why there isn’t a standalone option to set or customize the color scheme.

Pictopix may not have that special secret sauce to differentiate it from other nonogram puzzlers, but what it does offer is a polished, cleanly designed, and logically balanced puzzle experience bolstered by tens of hours worth of nonograms to solve as well as a variety of hint options catering to players of all skill levels. What the game lacks in personality and pizazz it more than makes up for in functionality and sheer volume of content.

Pros:
+ Efficient, intuitive interface
+ 150 puzzles in a broad range of sizes (plus future expansion through Steam Workshop)
+ Hint/difficulty settings cater to all skill levels
+ Suspend progress on multiple puzzles at the same time
+ Award system adds replay for completionists, skilled players

Cons:
– Unclear how many mistakes drop three awards to two
– No button to quick restart from the puzzle completion screen
– Can’t change background color without using hints

Game Info:
Platform: PC
Publisher: Tomlab Games
Developer: Tomlab Games
Release Date: 1/5/2017
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1

Source: Review code provided by developer

Buy From: Steam for $6.99

Oh noes! A ghost has scared all of the paintings in the art museum out of existence with his terrifying gaze. What are we to do? Repaint the whole gallery, that’s what.

This silly premise is the set up to Paint it Back, a nonogram puzzler from indie studio Casual Labs. By now I hope you know what a nonogram is. You know, those crossword-meets-Sudoku puzzles where numbers appear next to the rows and columns of a grid and the task is to systematically deduct the correct pattern to correctly fill in the squares until a final image is revealed? For gamers, Nintendo’s Picross is probably the most recognizable example of the genre to serve as a point of reference.

Paint it Back doesn’t do anything particularly new or original with the rules of nonogram puzzles, but it hones the core mechanics to about as close to perfection as they can get. The logic behind the puzzles has been designed with the utmost care, minimizing guesswork to only the largest, most challenging puzzles–and even then logical deductions still outweigh the need to guess.

The game balances difficulty in an ingenious way, scaling the size and end reward of puzzles depending on chosen level of challenge so that players of all skill levels are accommodated. For example a 30×30 puzzle played on Normal is split into nine smaller 10×10 sections that are solved individually and then form the full image once all sections are finished. That same puzzle on Pro difficulty is broken down into four slightly larger 15×15 sections. At the highest difficulty, Master, the whole puzzle appears at 30×30 for the maximum challenge. Each difficulty tier rewards an additional ribbon for completion–one ribbon for Normal, two for Pro, three for Master–and the ribbons serve as a form of currency that unlock new puzzle galleries. Ribbons do need to be earned in order to progress through all puzzle galleries, but the unlock requirements are never so strict that advancement becomes gated.

Casual Labs also nailed Paint it Back‘s interface; it’s clean, intuitive, and efficient. Gamepad controls are supported and operate smoothly, but mouse control is clearly the recommended input method. Left clicking fills in squares while right clicking places X marks to denote squares that you want to leave blank. Individual squares can be marked as such by precise pointing and clicking, or large groupings can be painted by holding down either click and then dragging to quickly fill in full rows or columns with one smooth motion. If an error is made, squares can be unpainted just as easily (there’s a manual redo/undo function as well). Keeping track of where you’re at on the grid is always clear thanks to a transparent glowing cross that extends from the cursor in both directions along the current row and column to highlight the exact position. As you work through a particular row or column, the numbers on the side become greyed out to show where you stand in a number sequence or if all necessary squares in a line have been painted so you know which unneeded squares can be crossed out. Activating mark-up mode allows for painting in squares in a different color so you can work through a tricky section before actually committing to fill in the puzzle, helping to avoid mistakes that might become impossible to back trace later on. Another helpful tool for practicing a puzzle is the Helping Hand. When the optional Helping Hand is activated before starting a puzzle, a little hand animation will appear whenever a square is incorrectly painted and auto-erase the mistake. The catch is that you don’t get credit for completing the puzzle if the Helping Hand is used, so it’s just something to use as a warm-up for the more difficult puzzles.

Some smaller details to the UI could be improved. Once the puzzles grow to 30×30 and larger, for instance, they can be difficult to see on a single screen when played at Master difficulty due to the scaled down grid squares and number font. Some form of magnification or zoom function would come in handy. Another limitation is the ability to only save one puzzle in progress at a time. When working on the Master puzzles it would be nice to store multiple works-in-progress, for when you get stumped on one and want to get a start on another. On the plus side, the game does allow for saving up to six individual profiles, in case you’re in a household with multiple players who want to save their own progress.

Paint it Back is overflowing with content. Its 150 base puzzles range in size, from as small as 5×5 to as large as 40×30, and are categorized into galleries of different themes, including animals, bugs, sports, portraits, dream scenes, and more. Some of the smaller puzzles are generic images like a sunflower, beach sunrise, or jack-o-lantern, but the majority of the puzzle paintings skew cute and silly with subjects like a surfing elephant, a puppy walking the plank, an ant wearing a top hat, a stallion caught wearing high heels, a zip-lining secret agent crab, Satan himself mowing the lawn, the sun put behind bars, or a certain red-headed late night talk show host waking up beneath the Gateway Arch. While filling them in, the puzzles are black and white, but upon completion the final image appears in full color. During play, there’s also a graphic of a canvas on an easel in the top-left corner that shows the image title as well as your real-time progress on the painting in color.

Additionally, after earning 100 ribbons a Mystery Masterpiece gallery becomes unlocked, which allows you to endlessly play random small puzzles with no pressure, or tackle random large puzzles while attempting to earn special badges for beating speedrun times, using a limited number of X marks, or not wasting paint on wrong squares. Since originally launching late last year, the game has recently been updated with an MS Paint-like level editor as well as Steam Workshop support for creating and sharing user-generated puzzles. Access to the editor and Workshop content is provided directly from the main menu. Searching for puzzles is as easy as scrolling through a list and choosing which ones to subscribe to. Puzzles can be downloaded and played immediately without having to close and reboot the game, and once finished puzzles can be rated with a thumbs up or down. For a small game, there seems to be a fairly active community pumping in new content. Obviously my favorite user-created puzzles so far have been the pixel art renditions of classic 8-bit characters like Link, Samus Aran, Yoshi, Pac-Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Q-bert, but there are also plenty of images of political satire and other random themes.

Paint it Back is such a well made nonogram puzzler, perhaps the best money can buy on Steam. Yes it sticks to the very basic rules of what a nonogram is, but every aspect of the game shows an attention to detail that you just have to appreciate. The puzzle logic is on point, the interface is clear and precise, the difficulty options are well balanced, the presentation is lighthearted and full of humor, and the abundance of content will keep you puzzle-painting away for literally tens of hours, if not forever depending on how loyal the Workshop community stays over the long haul. I’ve played for nearly 40 hours so far and still haven’t earned all ribbons or done more than a dozen user-created puzzles, that’s how much value this game has to offer.

Pros:
+ Puzzle images presented with silly charm and humor
+ Intuitive controls and interface
+ Tiered difficulty settings
+ Wealth of content
+ Excellent puzzle logic; little if any guesswork

Cons:
– The larger puzzles squished onto a single screen can be hard to see
– Only one puzzle-in-progress can be saved at a time

Game Info:
Platform: PC/Mac/Linux
Publisher: Casual Labs
Developer: Casual Labs
Release Date: 10/14/2015
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1

Source: Review code provided by developer

Buy From: Steam

It has taken far too long, but the PlayStation Vita finally has its answer to Picross.

Like Nintendo’s series of puzzle games, Sketchcross from Spiky Fish Games is a Nonogram logic puzzler. So what’s a Nonogram? It’s a type of picture puzzle that’s basically a hybrid of Sudoku, Minesweeper, and crosswords. Each puzzle consists of a grid — in this game they start as small as 5×5 and go all the way up to 30×30 — with numbers on the edges indicating how many squares in each column and row must be filled in. For example, on a 5×5 grid, if the number 5 appears next to a row or column, that means all squares in that row or column should be penciled in. However, if a sequence of numbers is shown, such as 1-1-1, you would alternate between a filled space and an empty space. Similarly, a 2-2 sequence would be completed by coloring the first two squares, leaving a space in the middle, and then coloring the next two squares.

As the puzzles grow larger, the patterns become far more difficult to discern. Through a steady process of elimination, you must determine which squares to fill in and which squares to leave blank until the darkened squares form a complete image. Once a puzzle is solved the hidden image is reconstructed as a blue and green 3D model, a small visual flourish waiting as a reward for your efforts. For the most part the puzzles in Sketchcross have clear starting points and logical solutions. However, in certain instances number sequences occur that require guessing, which is a big Nonogram no-no. Good Nonogram design should allow for systematically working out the number patterns from start to finish without ever requiring any guesswork, because even one mistakenly filled in square will throw off the entire puzzle and make it difficult to go back and correct without restarting from scratch.

The great thing about Sketchcross, though, is its varying level of difficulty. All 50 included puzzles can be completed at easy, normal, or hard difficulty. On the easy setting, puzzles have longer par completion times (you can take as long as needed to complete the puzzle, but a gold star is rewarded for beating the par time) and offer the benefit of an unlimited hint system which, at the push of a button, immediately validates a column/row or indicates if a column/row is incorrectly filled out. Switching to normal removes the hint system and reduces the par completion times. Hard difficulty carries over the same par times as normal, but instead of an endless timer the clock counts down in reverse, forcing you to solve the puzzle before time expires.

Completion time leaderboards are provided for each individual puzzle–though they don’t always seem to sync properly, as on a few occasions I noticed that some of my best times as seen from the level select menu were not showing up on the leaderboards. In addition to improving par times, Frenzy Mode offers snack gaming replay value in the form of an endless supply of randomly generated 5×5 puzzles. Each Frenzy puzzle has a strict 30 second time limit. If you finish before the clock hits zero a new puzzle loads, and thus the goal becomes trying to solve as many of them as you can in one run. It’s the perfect mode for daily time wasting when only small windows of gaming are available.

Sketchcross has a clean, minimalistic black and white presentation mimicking the look, feel and sound of pencil scribbles on crumpled notebook paper. However, the UI is a mixed bag. The menus are simple enough to navigate but do feel a bit slow and clunky. It’s odd that there is no way to wipe a puzzle clean or pause the game and restart for times when you make a mistake or miss a par time and want to start over. Instead, you have to quit back to the level select and flip through the book menus to get back to the level you were on. It takes a lot of unnecessary steps to do something that a basic restart button would address. I’m also surprised that the game doesn’t allow for saving puzzles in progress to resume later. Par times for some of the harder puzzles go as high as 20 to 30 minutes, and you may need even longer on the first try. That’s a long time to be staring at the Vita screen in a single session on a puzzle game that requires intense focus such as this, so the option to save and quit would have been handy for taking breaks. Sure, you can always pause and put the Vita to sleep, but that only works if you intend to come right back to the game.

The controls are equally inconsistent. Sketchcross supports both button and touchscreen input, each with its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the grid size of a puzzle. Button controls are more precise, but they are also slow because you have to navigate with a cursor and are only able to color in the grid one square at a time due to the inability to simply hold down a button and drag the cursor to smoothly fill in a line. Touch controls are much quicker because you can tap to paint any square on the grid or drag your finger across the screen to smoothly paint in long lines across multiple squares. However, once the puzzles become larger than 20×20 and take up more screen space, the squares become so small that, unless you have needle-thin fingers or a soft-tipped stylus that is safe to use, the accuracy of the touchscreen recognition decreases to the point where the game fills in a square next to the one you intended or an attempted line draw swerves off into other columns/rows. The view can be zoomed in and out to combat this, but then you just get caught into the hassle of constantly needing to zoom and pan the camera.

Neither control scheme feels fully optimized to work intuitively on its own, but when used in unison they do work well enough to get the job done. In other words, the controls are effective, just not always efficient. The good news is that the larger puzzles that bog down the controls make up only a small fraction of the total puzzle count. The first 35 to 40 puzzles are fine–it’s the last 10 that become too big to work comfortably with the Vita’s hardware. Given the platform’s limitations, 30×30 puzzles probably weren’t such a good idea. I would have preferred more puzzles at the 15×15 and 20×20 size.

Although it is lacking in execution and optimization in certain areas, I hold a favorable opinion of Sketchcross overall. It is a fun and largely functional Nonogram puzzler with multiple levels of challenge to accommodate puzzle solvers of all skill levels and a decent amount of replay offered by leaderboards and Frenzy Mode. 50 puzzles is a little lightweight, but at $7.99 the value is equal to the amount of content. Spiky Fish also plans to patch in new features and expand the game with additional puzzles via free downloadable content beginning sometime this month, so there is reason to be optimistic about the game growing and improving moving forward. Sketchcross is well worth playing as is if you’re a puzzle game junkie, but for everyone else it may be best to wait and see what happens with the updates and DLC before committing to a buy.

Pros:
+ Great to finally have a competent Nonogram puzzler on Vita
+ Multiple difficulty options accessible to all skill levels
+ Frenzy Mode offers fun bites of snack gaming on the go

Cons:
– Controls and UI lack optimization
– Larger 25×25 and 30×30 puzzles feel too big for the handheld format
– Guessing is needed to solve some puzzles

Game Info:
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Publisher: Spiky Fish Games
Developer: Spiky Fish Games
Release Date: 4/28/2015
Genre: Puzzle
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by developer

Nintendo’s 3D nonogram successor to Picross DS is a puzzle game about numbers and deductive logic. You are presented with a block and must chip away at it cube by cube until you’ve carved out the shape hidden within — the stylus is your chisel, numbers are your guide.

Numerical clues surround each block indicating how many cubes in each column and row belong to the object you are attempting to uncover, and it is your job to crunch those numbers and recognize patterns to correctly break off the excess cubes. If you do so successfully and find the object within the bonus time limit and without any misses, you can earn up to three gold stars to unlock bonus puzzles.

This starts off easy enough, but gradually new stipulations are introduced and the puzzles get trickier and trickier, as you would expect. Clues begin to take on different forms, such as circled and squared numbers indicating that the correct cubes in the current row/column and separated into multiple groupings rather than in consecutive order as usual, and different rules force you to complete certain puzzles without a single misstep or add hard time limits that can be increased by quickly removing cubes.

There is a sameness to the game that may be misconstrued as repetitive, but similarly to genre classics like Tetris, Picross 3D shines at making a simple concept endlessly fun and replayable, thanks to intelligent puzzle designs, well-balanced difficulty, and one of the most precise and intuitive touch-based interfaces I’ve used on the DS. Every time you think you’ve finally mastered the tricks of the trade, a puzzle comes along and stumps you for 20-30 minutes, and even though you are repeating the same process over and over again, the game remains fresh and addictive.

That’s good too, because Picross 3D is so loaded with content that it demands a long-term commitment to see through to the end. According to the back of the box, over 365 puzzles are included. I’ve had an early copy of the game since last week and have played at least 2-3 hours a day in that time, and yet I’ve only finished 187 puzzles. So in 15-20 hours of play time I’ve completed a little over half of the puzzles, and in all that time my interest hasn’t wavered for even a second. I’ve laid in bed until 3:00 AM playing “just one more game” on multiple nights — only stopping because of eye fatigue and mental exhaustion — and even right now I’m fighting the urge to stop typing and go play another puzzle or two (or three, or four, or five…). That’s how addictive it is!

What’s more, Picross 3D comes with an editor you can use to craft custom puzzles with – simply place cubes to make a shape, give it a name, set the background graphic and music, click complete, and the game generates the rest of the puzzle automatically – and Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection support for future DLC and themed challenges users can participate in with their puzzle creations. A downloadable puzzle pack has already been released with five free puzzles, and the current challenge is looking for “Spring” themed submissions. Unfortunately, though, like with other DS (and Wii) games with user-created content, custom puzzles can only be shared locally with friends – there is no option for online sharing.

Best of all, Picross 3D, as part of Nintendo’s “Touch Generations” casual brand, is dirt cheap. Only $20 is separating you from what in my opinion is the current frontrunner for DS game of the year. Go play it, NOW!

Pros:
+ Unique and supremely addictive gameplay
+ Incredibly smooth and precise touch-screen controls
+ Intuitive puzzle creator
+ Infinite replayability

Cons:
– No online puzzle sharing

Game Info:
Platform: DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: HAL Laboratory, Inc.
Release Date: 5/3/2010
Genre: Puzzle
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1 (2-5 for local puzzle sharing and single-card download play)
Source: Review copy provided by publisher