PictoQuest - The Cursed Grids
A fantasy themed picross
Developer: NanoPiko
Publisher: PID Games
Genre: Nonogram/Picross, puzzle
I love Nonograms, also known as Picross. They’re a fun little logic puzzle that once you know the rules, you can solve pretty much any puzzle through counting. There’s many Picross video games out there, and PictoQuest tries its hand at tweaking the formula a little bit.
By this I mean it tries to add in some RPG flavoring. The level select is designed like an RPG world map, and the puzzles are all some sort of fantasy midieval themed thing, like a crossbow or an ifirt. There’s a vague sorta-story going on in the background. That kind of stuff.
To navigate you click on the puzzle you want to solve, or use the arrow keys to traverse the “map.” All puzzles are solved in order, with a few NPCs to the side that give you little quests. You get teleport points you can go back to, if you ever wanna revisit a puzzle. You cannot pan the camera, or zoom in or out. In puzzle controls are left click to fill a square and right click to put an X.
There’s a mechanics added to the puzzles to add more spice. And I don’t mean tools and QoL options like auto blocking out finished rows or graying out numbers. I mean that you are give an HP pool, and if you do not solve the puzzle fast enough enemies will start smacking that HP pool. How you stop this is by completing a line to interrupt them and damage them.
There are also occasional treasure chests, and if you solve them fast enough you get a prize, but it doesn’t attack you or do anything, really. It just sits there. Like a chest.
As for the normal picross “mechanics,” which never seem the same in any two games, are a setup I don’t really like with a few things I do like. First, there is the standard markings of X and Filled Squares. You can mark an X on any block, correctly or incorrectly, without penalty. If you are dragging to draw a long line and you draw over an X, it does not erase or mark over that X. These things I very very much like.
However, you’re not allowed mistakes. Everytime you place an incorrect square, your enemies get a free hit. Or, if you’re up against a treasure chest, you lose some coin. And there’s no option to change this in settings. In fact the only options are Volume and Language. And while I get the concept of tracking mistakes, I don’t really like ones that don’t let you erase at all. Sometimes I just kinda misclick, and while I’m annoyed when I’m wrong, I’m even more annoyed when I’m accidentally right. But I suppose that’s just me.
The red squares are ones placed manually, while the gray ones are ones automatically placed.
The puzzles were a good mix of difficulties, starting with standard 5x5 and going up to 20x20. Unfortunately, since the game is linear in its puzzle unlocks, you get all your easier maps towards the early game and bigger maps later on.
It’s got good enough replayability, I suppose, but going back to do specific puzzles is infuriatingly clunky, with no fast way to go back to a specific puzzle. Wanna go back and redo the fairy? Good luck remembering which part of the map it was in, and which direction too!
I also have absolutely no idea how many puzzles there are in the game as it would be entirely too cumbersome to count.
It’s not a bad picross game, and I quite enjoyed it, but a few of the wannabe RPG features made it fall a little flat. There’s better picross games out there.
But at least the art is incredibly cute!
Review posted 2023/11/16