I’m a huge fan of the “a-Pix” games from Lightwood Games, and when I first heard about Block-a-Pix Deluxe I assumed it would be their version of Piczle Lines DX from Score Studios. So when I saw it was a completely unique (at least to me) game where players have to form rectangles of various colors to complete images, I was pleasantly surprised.
Puzzles in Block-a-Pix Deluxe present players with numerous partially-colored squares with loads of white squares around them. Your goal is to complete the image by stretching those partially-colored, numbered squares into rectangles. They can be long, skinny rectangles, big squares, or anything in between, and they can be stretched in any direction. The only rules are that every square will be filled in when you’re done, the rectangles have to be made up of exactly the number of squares as the partially-colored square says, and you can’t make shapes other than rectangles.
Like Pic-a-Pix Deluxe, Block-a-Pix Deluxe comes with loads of puzzles to solve, and they get progressively bigger and tougher. The 120 puzzles range from 15×23 to massive 65×100 puzzles, nearly 20x bigger than the first puzzles! It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that while the early puzzles took less than 10 minutes each, completing the final puzzle in the game took me TWO AND A HALF HOURS.
The one thing that surprised me the most was just how laid back I felt while I was conquering the hardest puzzle. It was definitely much tougher because of how many more options there were, but the strategy was still the same: find a starting point and work from there, then head to another starting point, and keep going until the whole image is solved.
Of course, it also helps that the Y button checks for errors, just like it does in Pic-a-Pix Deluxe. This is still a magnificent inclusion, it allows casual players to check to see if they’ve made any mistakes or not. You can also choose to undo any mistakes you make, but I avoid using that feature and just undo recent changes until I get an error count of zero again. This one little touch allows people to customize their own difficulty: if you don’t want the stress, play like I do or have the game undo the errors for you. If you want a more hardcore puzzle experience, just don’t ever check for errors at all! The game also rewards players for not making the game fix errors for you by awarding a medal upon completion of each puzzle.
In true Lightwood Games fashion, DLC are already rolling out. In the three months since release, four DLC packs have been released. Each of these holds 30 extra puzzles and has a regular price of $2.99. If even a couple puzzles in each DLC pack are as long as the last puzzle in the base game, I’m looking forward to checking them out as well!
Block-a-Pix Deluxe is available on Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita.
A review code was provided for this review.