The Switch is full of unique puzzle games I’d never heard of before. Pic-a-Pix Deluxe is actually one of my favorite Switch games, and when I heard about Piczle Lines DX I assumed it was the same type of puzzle. Imagine my surprise when I found out that, despite ending up with awesome artwork just like in Pic-a-Pix Deluxe, the process to get there is vastly different. Piczle Lines DX (reviewed by Stark Wyvern here at Real Otaku Gamer) is a puzzle game in which you’re presented with a bunch of empty squares (piczles?), some of which have numbers with colored circles. Your task is to connect squares with matching numbers/colored circles to one another using exactly the number of squares on them to connect them. As with many puzzle games, it’s far easier to see it in action than it is to explain.
Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles is essentially a huge expansion for Piczle Lines DX, but the game stands alone – it doesn’t require you to own anything else to play it and doesn’t require any prior knowledge. Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles has, you guessed it, 500 puzzles to play. These puzzles are split into 25 categories with 20 puzzles each, and they range from 12×12 all the way up to 128×128! These are themed, such as Mythical Beasts, Legendary Heroes, and Hobbies, with a total of 8 focused on specific countries. One of the categories, the most challenging of all, is “One Color Puzzles”. Trust me, these are MUCH harder; even the smallest puzzle gave me some major trouble!
Like Pic-a-Pix Deluxe, I was really surprised at how awesome the pieces looked at the end. Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles’ puzzles take much longer to complete though; the smallest puzzles can take a good 10+ minutes while the larger ones will easily take hours to complete. I spent a great deal of time on one of the 128×128 puzzles and was taken aback when I saw just how little (less than 25%!) of the puzzle I completed.
Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles masterfully walks the fine line between too challenging and still doable for casual folks. I normally do everything I can in a puzzle game to be 100% sure of a move before I make it, and I really had to break myself of that mindset here. You can easily undo lines by double-clicking them, and you’ll be doing it a lot as trial and error is the name of the game. It’s brilliant how the different colors allow you to be certain of a specific area once you fill it in (every square is filled in by some color on practically every puzzle). Some numbers are obvious: if there are two 5s that are exactly 5 squares apart from one another in a line, it’s clear that you need to connect them. Other times you’ll have big numbers that can connect all sorts of ways, and it’ll often take some fiddling around to figure out exactly how to fill in every square.
The controls are as smooth as the gameplay, and you can use either the touchscreen or the joysticks and buttons. I ended up doing a fair bit of both; touching the screen is much quicker for drawing a bunch of easy lines, but using the joystick is better for figuring things out and precision. Mistakes are always easy to clear, and you’re not scored in any way so you can make and undo 400,000 mistakes or 0 and still end up with awesome, complete artwork at the end. My only wish was that the game had a button to check for mistakes, even if it just told you how many mistakes you had instead of showing you which lines are wrong. Some sections are incredibly difficult with lots of possible moves, and a mistake checker would’ve come in very handy. Ultimately the truest way of knowing whether you messed up or not is whether you can actually connect all of the lines or if there are holes between them, but knowing whether I laid down a 16-piczle line correctly or not would be a godsend.
Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles is a terrific game for puzzle fans, and there’s a lot of bang for your buck. These 500 puzzles will easily take a few hundred hours to complete, something that can’t even be said for many games that cost 5x as much. It also includes a brief, neat look at “The Art of Piczle” in a bonus menu section available right from the beginning. Here you can find character development sketches, a quick breakdown of turning an image into a 128×128 puzzle and all kinds of other fun stuff. It’s an interesting look into the game’s development and beyond with toys and even a piczle cake to celebrate the launch of Piczle Lines DX. That’s a great deal of content for an MSRP of $10!
Piczle Lines DX: 500 More Puzzles is available for Nintendo Switch (reviewed).
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.