#IndieXmas: Pic-a-Pix Pieces (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Pic-a-Pix Pieces on the Nintendo Switch from Lightwood Games for Xinthus' #IndieXmas.  The game was given and received with no promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels.  All of the words contained in this article unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience playing the game.

Pic-a-Pix Pieces by Lightwood Games is exactly what it looks like.  It is a picross game where you do not just fill in blocks, but fill them in with pre-selected colors in order to create a piece of a larger picture.  Pictures range in size from six up to 20 individual blocks of 10x10 to 20x20 sized puzzles and vary in difficulty from easy, being able to be completed in a few minutes (for me at least) up to very difficult which can take me upwards of 20 minutes per puzzle.

Going into this game, I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into.  I have had some experience with picross games, mainly through Pokemon Picross and My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, both on the 3DS, as well as a number of picross games played on Conklederp's iPad.  So I am no stranger to this format, but the biggest difference here, for me at least, is that the puzzles incorporate separate colors that are pre-determined when you start each puzzle.  Instead of just filling out squares with black boxes, here  you might fill out four boxes with yellow, three boxes with orange, one box with orange, and one box with blue.  Where those boxes are in the picross grid is where the puzzle lies.

The concept it pretty simple, but then again the concept of Sudoku is simple as well and anyone who has ever played the game already knows how more and more difficult the puzzles can get.  A feature that I have seen in most picross games is the ability to check your work, but that usually comes at a price, either diminishing your final score from the coveted 3 STARS down to 2, or perhaps a time penalty.  Here, the game simply tells you if you have any mistakes (by pressing the Y button) and if you do have mistakes, the game offers to fix them; I think that is where the cost is, that you end up with a silver or bronze medal for the overall picture instead of a gold medal.

Like this puzzle, which is the last puzzle in the game looks to be pretty difficult.  I skipped it after taking this pic.

Because this game is available on the Switch, I did wonder if and how it would make use of the touchscreen, which seemed only natural for this type of game.  For the most part the controls in the game are pretty intuitive with either A or B buttons being used to apply the color, or if you use the same color over an existing square, then it will remove that color back to being blank.  What the game does not do is replace an already filled square with a new color.  So if you have an orange square and you notice that it should be green instead, you either have to select the eraser tool (by touch or the directional buttons), or have the orange color selected and click on that square, then select green and fill it in again.  It feels more cumbersome than it really should be.  Also filling in squares that you know are blank with an X seems like it takes extra steps to complete, but thankfully both joy sticks can move the cursor so you can move the cursor while selecting the X with your finger.  Maybe I am just making things more difficult for myself?  And then I found out that you could place an X simply by pressing the B button.

Another part of the way that Pic-a-Pix Pieces uses colors along the border is that I will sometimes finding myself tripped up but those colors while I am trying to figure out where the colors are supposed to go in the puzzle.  Even more so on the puzzles where you only have two colors where there are a lot of alternating blues and blacks for instance.  Maybe this is not an issue for some people, but for myself I sometimes find it distracting.

While I am talking about colors, Lightwood Games has an added feature that is specifically designed to be adaptive for people who have some degree of color blindness.  Some games I have seen have a handful of options that will change the colors around to be more user-friendly, but what Pic-a-Pix Pieces has is a full RGB slider that lets you change the colors to whatever you want, allowing for the whole spectrum of color blindness; I can only guess though as I personally am not color blind and have not run this by anyone who is.

Lastly I wanted to touch on the music in the game, which would not surprise me if it was purchased music and not written for the game.  This is not a knock on the developer's choice of music as it reminds me of music that I might find in Paperboy on the NES, and there have been a number of indie games whose music I have loved (Heroes of the Monkey Tavern, and The Adventures of Elena Temple) who were unable to, for whatever reason, have original music.  The point is, the music, while somewhat catchy does get a little repetitive, especially on the harder puzzles where I feel like concentration is a must.

Pic-a-Pix Pieces is currently (as of 12/19/2019) on sale for $3.99 marked down from $7.99, which both seem like decent prices.  Although, I personally would probably not purchase at the regular price point because while I do enjoy picross puzzles, I do not know if I enjoy them that much.  If I think about it a different way: would I buy a physical paperback book of picross puzzles to do on a roadtrip for $3.99?  I definitely would if I was specifically looking for picross puzzles.  And there look to be upwards of 20 pictures comprised of 100+ individual puzzles so the content is here.  And if you still are not sure if picross puzzles are your thing, there is a demo available to test out the waters.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Instrumental


P.S.  One thing I might have added, which would fit in with the puzzle "Pieces" in the title, is if  after completing the set puzzles for the particular picture, if you had to rearrange them to actually piece together a puzzle.  To me, at least, that would add an extra element that might be fun.