Story of Seasons? Good. Nonograms (aka Picross)? Good. Ergo, Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons: good.
Those 15 words could probably be sufficient enough a review. This is exactly what it says on the tin: nonogram puzzles with a Story of Seasons theme, no more and no less. Assuming you like either (or both) of those things, you’re in for a treat. A certified “Yeah!” on the Yeah/Nah scale. That’s my job here done.
… But I guess a more fulsome review is warranted.
For the uninitiated, nonograms are logic puzzles that see you filling in squares on a grid, ultimately creating a little pixel art image once all the right cells are filled in. Number sequences alongside each row and column are the clues that tell you how many squares need to be filled, but not the sizes of any gaps between them. Logical deduction and a process of elimination tell you which squares should definitely be filled (or definitely not be), in turn helping fill in the test of the blanks—both literally and figuratively.
Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons collects some 350 such puzzles, covering everything from farm tools and crops to familiar characters from the last few Story of Seasons games. Among that number is a handful of collage puzzles, where a bunch of smaller individual nonograms make up the pieces of a bigger picture. The puzzles themselves are well designed and logically sound, with no deductive stalemates forcing a need for guesswork or trial and error.
A handful of optional assist functions are available to those who want them: auto-fill a few squares when starting a new puzzle, highlight rows/columns that can be solved, automatically correct mistakes, or check for mistakes through a menu option. You’ve also got tools for undoing moves and counting a selection of squares. It’s a fairly standard feature set, following the formula set down by Jupiter’s genre-defining Picross games.
The one oddity—and this is a pedantic nitpick, I fully acknowledge—is in how the game displays the usage of assists on completed puzzles. Instead of some sort of accolade for completing a puzzle with no assists, some visual flair that you can aim for as a marker of a perfect game, Piczle Cross shows symbols for each hint used. For those who care about such things, the marker of an unassisted clear is the absence of “medals” instead of the presence of them.
The images unveiled by solving the puzzles are neat. Regular puzzles cover tools, crops, household decorations, village buildings, and Story of Seasons characters, while festivals get special treatment in the collage puzzles. Blocky pixel art is the order of the day, by design and necessity—puzzle size determines how many pixels the artists have to work with, after all, and they top out at 20×20 for a regular puzzle. Collages have a bigger canvas to work with, but in depicting whole scenes rather than individual items or character faces, they retain the same pixelated look.
It’s a very stylised approach to low-res art, with plenty of personality—a natural fit for the inherent, colourful charm of the source material. “Delightful” isn’t a word I’d typically use to describe pictures of tomatoes or watering cans, but here we are. Seeing the finished image is always part of the appeal of a nonogram, but particularly so here.
The Story of Seasons theme flows into the general presentation of Piczle Cross, too. An animated 3D farm is the background for all your puzzle solving, with changing seasons as you progress. Each completed puzzle moves the calendar forward a day, so every 28 puzzles brings new seasonal scenery. The colour scheme for the puzzle UI changes with the seasons, too: an icy blue grid over snow-white squares for winter, green and earthy brown for spring, and so on. It’s an entirely cosmetic thing, but a fun touch all the same.
The last piece of the Story of Seasons connection is the almanac: a repository of artwork and short character bios from featured games with entries that unlock as you complete puzzles. It’s nothing fancy or innovative, but a nice, simple way of tying the puzzles back to the games they’re based on. There’s a bit of nostalgia for the Story of Seasons stalwarts, and a brief little introduction for the uninitiated who’ve come here for the nonograms first and foremost.
Which brings me right back to where I started. Story of Seasons is good stuff, and nonogram puzzles are good stuff. By that logic, Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons is good stuff. That’s especially true if, like me, you’re already fond of both sides of the equation. But even if not—if you’re a picross puzzler who’s never touched a farm sim, or a longtime farmhand who’s never delved into these picture puzzles—Piczle Cross is a lovely way to get a taste of something different.
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch with a review code supplied by the publisher.
Story of Seasons? Good. Nonograms (aka Picross)? Good. Ergo, Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons: good.
