ABP. Always Be Picrossing.

This recent release caught my eye: a new Picross clone with RPG elements! It’s also got an attractive cartoony art style as well as nice UI in general, which made a good first impression.

Your would-be hero character travels between nodes on a basic map, solving puzzles to progress. It’s not unlike Jupiter’s Picross 2 on Game Boy in that way. The RPG system works like an alternate form of a timer/mistake punisher. Monsters appear which you attack by completing rows or columns, damaging them and resetting their attack timer. If the latter fills up or if you fill an incorrect square, they hit you. Other times you’re just facing down a treasure chest, and mistakes lower your gold total.

The occasional shop on the map lets you spend your gold. I saved up for health extensions but you can also get health potions, or orbs with various effects eg. freezing enemies or revealing parts of the grid. I didn’t find these necessary at all (and wanted to complete the puzzles myself using logic, as intended) so had a lot of unspent money by the end.

NPCs also appear with sidequests offering more unneeded items, taking the form of puzzles you’ve already completed but with an extra modifier. I didn’t usually find these modifiers that interesting, but it was worth doing the sidequests to meet the silly characters and experience their dialogue, despite (or because of?) the incredibly broken English they spoke. It was made by a small French team, so fair enough, but the publisher really should have organised a decent localisation. They clearly didn’t.

So the RPG trappings were little more than window dressing in my experience of the game, but they’re effective as that. Fortunately the puzzling itself was quite good, ramping up to eventual 20x20 grids. The game uses button controls which work decently (although I miss using a stylus). The grids form coherent pictures with a fantasy theme, and animate very nicely when completed.

I have very few complaints about the fundamentals of the Picross gameplay in PictoQuest. The RPG stuff is a tad underdeveloped perhaps? But it doesn’t get in the way. Overall it’s one of the better Picross clones I’ve played, and could easily stand alongside Jupiter’s efforts. Well done Nanopiko.