Picross, also known as nonograms, are a type of logic puzzle that has become increasingly popular in gaming over the last decade or so. A wide variety of picross-style games have been released and they’re generally low-stress puzzle games with generic music and some cutesy pictures. A few have tried to bridge the gap to mainstream gaming however. Piczle Cross Adventure from Score Studios and Plug In Digital is one of those titles.
In Piczle Cross Adventure, you play Score-chan, an arrogant, unlikeable child that is surly and full of herself. Along with his animal friend Gig (who is about 5 pixels and one shade of orange away from copyright infringement on Sega’s Carbuncle), Score-chan has to reorganize the vaporized matter all around the town because pixel dust has disintegrated everything. It sounds hokey but compelling, right? An adventure game where you solve puzzles? Well, things are a bit weirder than that.
First off, the entire game is presented like it’s the second or third game in a series, but there is no mention anywhere of another game. It turns out there are two other picross games from Score Studios, called Piczle Lines DX and Piczle Lines DX 500 More Puzzles, and they feature Score-chan, Gig, and Professor Matrix, but they don’t really appear to have a plot, making the storyline here all the more confusing. Add to that a huge amount of weird, childish humor, and you’ve got yourself Piczle Cross Adventure. As a side note, while it’s not an issue in other titles in this ‘series’, in Piczle Cross Adventure, it’s surprisingly difficult to tell Score-chan’s gender, as Score Studios has significantly changed the character designs, making them more pixellated to fit with the game’s plot. It’s not relevant to the game, but it is definitely noticeable.
Now, on top of the weird plot with weird characters, weirder situations, and rather bizarre humor, Piczle Cross Adventure has a fair amount of other strange choices. The visual style is pixel-based but the default setting runs through a filter that feels like your eyes are being stabbed with tiny icepicks. Without checking the submenu settings, you might think there was something wrong with the program, but there isn’t. This is a conscious design choice made to give Piczle Cross a more retro flavor and it absolutely fails. It’s just hard to look at and unpleasant. Fortunately you can turn it off, along with turning down the incredibly repetitive and irritating music. Seriously, it’s like the composer wrote half a chiptune song and just left it on infinite repeat about 30% louder than is comfortable. It’s the aural equivalent of having earwigs crawling all over you and it’s simply horrid.
But hey, you’re here for the puzzles, right? Well, not to fear, there are lots of picross puzzles in Piczle Cross Adventure! 5 x 5 puzzles, 10 x 15 puzzles, even four part 10 x 10 puzzles where you put the pieces together to form a larger picture. Sadly, like everything else in Piczle Cross, the puzzling is also flawed. The biggest mistake is the complete lack of a touch interface for the Nintendo Switch. This is a mistake that so many picross games make and it’s just common sense. You’re filling in boxes and the Switch has a touch screen. Enable it! For the love of everything that is right and good in the world, put touch compatibility in ALL PICROSS GAMES!!! Whew. Yeah, so that’s an issue. Everything must be handled by the interface, so let’s take a look at it.
The interface for Piczle Cross Adventure is a bit lacking. Sure, you can highlight stuff, cross it out, and hop from the top of the screen to the bottom with the flick of a stick. But it’s the little things that ruin the experience here. You can’t simply replace an X with a marked box or vice versa(and if you don’t know what that means, you shouldn’t be here because this is not a beginner’s picross game). Instead you have to laboriously erase the X by hitting the appropriate button and then mark it with the mark button. Sounds fine, but if you mistakenly put a whole line in wrong, it’s a pain in the butt. Why not hit the back button and just redo the line properly, you ask? Good question! There isn’t one! There’s no back button for your puzzles so if you did make a serious error two moves ago, everything is filled in and you have to figure out what you did wrong. It’s more than a bit of a hassle too. Depending on your settings, a whole line can be prefilled entirely wrong and you have to laboriously undo it all, hoping to hell that you haven’t missed anything that will throw the whole puzzle off.
Speaking of settings, there are a whole whack of them for Piczle Cross Adventure. You can tweak the way puzzles display, backgrounds, settings for puzzle rules, the whole enchilada. You can set puzzles to prefill when a line is complete, autocorrect mistakes with a corresponding time penalty, and lots of other things. In fact, if you don’t actually care how much time you complete a puzzle in, you can actually just set the puzzles to autocorrect then run the cursor over each square in the puzzle, complete the whole thing, and not even try to solve it. There’s no penalty, although if you’re good at picross, this actually takes longer than solving some of the puzzles. There are no hints for puzzles either, so if you can’t solve It, you might be stuck. There’s a clue roulette function that fills one horizontal and one vertical row at the beginning if you want, but on a particularly hard puzzle, even this might not help because it’s completely random. Most puzzles are fairly easy though, and can be completed in well under 5 minutes.
Aside from picross puzzling, there are a few other things to note about Piczle Cross Adventure. You wander about an overworld solving puzzles and restoring the world, but everything has a bit too much load time. Every room or area transition takes a bit longer than it should. After solving every puzzle, there’s a little graphic that shows each item or person phasing back into our reality and it’s incredibly tedious and can’t be skipped. The same goes for the incredibly necessary auto-fill , which has a tedious randomizing graphic that you have to wait for in every single puzzle rather than just instantly filling the lines. Everything feels like it’s designed to draw the game out longer and longer and wears out it’s welcome quite quickly. Every dialogue sequence takes longer than it should too, and the level of immersion simply doesn’t justify the time spent. Oh, and there are levels of experience too. You need to level up to complete some puzzles, which is just downright irritating. Here’s the last puzzle you need to complete the area, come back when you’re level 5 in three more hours. Aaaargh!
But the worst thing about Piczle Cross Adventure is Score-chan herself. She’s rude. She’s arrogant. She’s irritating. She makes you want the villain to vaporizer her and she’s an absolutely irredeemable character. It’s a bizarre choice in a fairly cutesy game to have such an unlikeable protagonist and yet that’s exactly the case here. By the third area, you might simply want to quite because of Score-chan alone. She’s that irritating. Ultimately, if you’re making a story-based puzzle game, at least make the main character boring and impersonal. Fun is fine, silly is fine. But rude, arrogant, and impossible to identify with? That’s simply a poor choice.
Piczle Cross Adventure is a hot mess of a picross game. With counter intuitive puzzle controls, bad music, and bad characters, it makes for a rough playthrough. The puzzles themselves are good, the graphic design is good, and the game looks like it would be really fun. And by all rights it should be fun, but it just isn’t. This is a game better off avoided, especially for the $10 you’ll spend on it. The entire concept is neat and quirky, and the puzzle mechanic options are fantastic but the execution leaves something to be desired on almost every level.
This review was based on a digital copy of Piczle Cross Adventure for the Nintendo Switch. It was played in both docked and undocked modes and was identical in both. Piczle Cross Adventure is also available for the PC on Steam. All screenshots are of actual gameplay.