Indie Game of the Week 485: Piczle Cross Adventure

If there's anything I like more than exploraction games, puns, and being correct on the internet, it's picross. Picross, or nonograms to give them their non genericized brand names, is a type of logic puzzle in which you're filling in a grid of tiles to create a picture, as opposed to a grid of random numbers or a grid of deadly explosives. They're pretty plentiful thanks to Nintendo's own Picross series and its numerous imitators like O-Chan no Oekaki Logic or Colorful Logic, and more recently Indie devs have been dropping their own variants on Steam and other digital storefronts. However, what interests me more at this juncture are the subversions and hybrids, since we've already seen plenty of the standard variety over the years. Aberrations like Murder by Numbers, that factored the nonogram puzzles into its Ace Attorney-lite plot of a homicide conspiracy in a pastel-tinted '90s Hollywood, or the F2P Pokémon Picross that incorporated the Pokémon's abilities as tools to make solving puzzles easier for its younger target demographic. Piczle Cross Adventure is another such evolution of the formula: a top-down open world game built like the classic Zeldas where the goal is to restore your average town after most of its fixtures (and people) are turned into nonogram puzzles.

We're deep in the woods here, so this is either a squirrel, a bush, or some very dated print pornography.

Piczle Cross Adventure has a pretty simple set-up with its tale of a professor's invention falling into the wrong hands, causing widespread panic as random objects are zapped with "piczle dust" and turned into what look like miniature black holes. After solving the nonogram puzzles they've been transformed into, however, they revert back to normal and may offer some advice, benefit, or a key item that'll help you navigate the rest of the world map. Much like Zelda, barriers and broken bridges abound and until you have the right item—or, occasionally, have reached a high enough level from earning XP by solving puzzles—the areas those obstacles are barricading remain inaccessible. At the same time, the game itself goes out of its way to reassure players that they don't have to solve every puzzle out there: just the ones critical to progress. Of course, since you have no idea what any of these objects or people used to be until you solve their attached puzzles, it's not always easy to ascertain the most efficient route through the story.

On the nonogram side of things, the game's so far offered a fair array of grid sizes and complexity, with tougher puzzles typically of a 15x15 size gated off by the XP system to ensure some semblance of a difficulty curve remains for those perhaps less acquainted with the format. In addition to solo puzzles there'll also be the occasional multi-part puzzle for larger items: for example, the professor's car, parked just outside his house, requires solving four 10x10 puzzles to summon it back from the non-Euclidian void it was hanging out in (though it did also come back with a wheel clamp attached, since it was a no parking area as you'll discover once you've restored the "No Parking" sign too). Once you procure the map—which needs to be filled in by visiting each of the game's areas first—you can see where puzzles and other hidden items can be found, if not necessarily reached right away, and a logbook discovered almost as quickly can track the puzzles you've completed and let you retry them if you're so inclined. The game is nothing if not accommodating with its open-world format and QoL mechanics, allowing you to explore and solve puzzles at your own pace.

Naturally, given the number of pixellated items to nonogram back to the land of the living, the game presents itself with a sort of lo-fi 8-bit look that it emphasizes further with an on-by-default CRT scanline filter and some very '90s fashion choices and humor. The protagonist Score-chan, presumably named for the developers Score Studios, oddly resembles a certain gremlin Vtuber in both fashion style and personality (though I suspect she's instead modelled on the titular little sister of Himouto! Umaru-chan (don't ask; my weird anime predilections are well documented elsewhere)) and she's a fine comedic heroine to hang a straightforward narrative like this on, even if you're sometimes skeptical she has the mental means to solve half these puzzles. The world is relatively abstract due to the aesthetic simplicity but reconstituting all the missing objects does fill them with character in time and the map has a cute feature where a region with all its puzzles completed regains its color, giving you a quick visual heads-up about what you still have left to resolve and where. Like I said, it's a game that's less cagey with its secrets than it is determined to keep the player motivated in pressing further and uncovering more of what the game has in store for them.

For a relatively simple casual game I've taken a shine to Piczle Cross Adventure and its particular picross puzzle delivery mechanism, effectively bridging the standard table of puzzles found in most picross games with the Zelda model of an overworld (though no dungeons yet) that can't immediately be accessed in full and requires a bit of adventure game logic from the player to investigate. There's a hope Nintendo sees what they're doing here and has this studio, or probably their own in-house nonogram-wranglers Jupiter, make an official Zelda one of these with this same approach. Score Studios has already worked with other Japanese devs for some crossovers—Rune Factory and Story of Seasons so far, though I can imagine more are coming—so it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility. Either way, I'm going to keep hunting for nonogram puzzlers that invent new ways to re-frame a puzzle subgenre that's been around in games for three decades now (and longer if we're talking the original magazine format) and could always use the innovation.

That bonus to sincerity will definitely come in clutch when I have to explain to some poor pensioner that her poodle only exists as a grid of numbers and dots now.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

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