Pictopix (PC)

Some games try to create an entirely new gaming experience. Some games try to take a preexisting concept and add an interesting new twist to it. And then there are games like Pictopix, where they try to do something previously established but really, really well.

 

Pictopix isn’t really reinventing Picross so much as it is try to take the traditional gameplay of it and polish it to perfection.  While the presentation is a bit spartan, Pictopix’s goal seems to be executing the pictogram puzzle concept as perfectly as possible without any new gimmicks introduced. One of the first ways Pictopix excels at this task is teaching Picross in an easy to understand tutorial that goes the extra mile to teach you the advanced tactics that help with deeper play. Picross itself is a grid-based puzzle where the player tries to create an image by filling in squares. To help the player find out which squares to fill in, sets of numbers are placed above the columns and to the left of the rows. These numbers indicate how many spaces must be filled in, but if there are multiple numbers listed for a column or row, that indicates how many consecutive spaces are filled in before you break up the chain and start a new one. Besides just using these clues though, you sometimes need to identify how big the spaces between consecutive filled in spaces are, and there are few tactics for identifying how a row or column can be laid out. Pictopix directly teaches you how to do this with small example puzzles, so while you might not need them for the fairly easy 5×5 grids you start with, when you get really late into the game’s generous amount of puzzles, you’ll have already learned how to handle the enormous 40×40 grids as well as every step up in size in between.

 

Pictopix already comes packed in with an incredibly high number of developer built puzzles, the images you’re revealing coming from a variety of sources. A simple word clue will help get you started on understanding what you might be creating, and as the image begins to take shape you can sometimes start making decisions based on where the picture being created needs spaces filled in to be fully realized. Sometimes the game is clever and has the image revealed in the negative space left behind by filling in everything else, but the most important thing is most objects are apparent as you work on them. When you are creating a picture of a dolphin you can start to see it taking form, and realizing a computer, moon, snail, or ice skate is taking shape helps to make the progress feel more tangible. The game does have a few pictures that will only really come together when the reveal is made like an image of the sunset, and the grid-based nature of Picross means something like a seagull looks a little strange and heavily simplified, but the picture selection is a good fit for the puzzles and adjusts well with the expanding grid size to include more detailed images. Unfortunately, some of those details are arbitrary and seem like they’re put there specifically to throw you off like an outrigger canoe image having random lilypads beside it or the smile having a beauty mark floating off away from the lips just to make figuring out the number clues a little harder.

Despite that small stumble, there are a lot of tools to help you with the simple act of filling out the grids. Each puzzle is rated on a crown system based on if you can solve it with few mistakes and without using the hints, but hints can be turned on to help you spot which rows or columns you should be working on. While most of your involvement with a puzzle will be filling in the right spaces, you can also fill in spaces with a transparent marker to help you keep track of areas you might not want to fill in yet and you can cross out spaces that you have determined are supposed to be left blank. Control options allow for quickly placing these in a line while protecting you from accidentally dragging your cursor off course,  and the harder Picross puzzles are definitely made more manageable when you can make punishment free markers on the grid instead of having to count with your fingers or some other trick common to Picross titles.

 

However, while the crown system is only for achievements and personal accomplishment, it does seem to stand in for perhaps the one big option this game is lacking. If you fill in the wrong area in a puzzle, there is no indicator or hint that you did so. Many Picross games will punish you in some form and notify you that an error was made, and while having no negative consequence for filling in spaces can help people looking to relax while playing, it does mean a large puzzle can be seemingly complete and you have to spend a long time finding out where the problem lies. A simple option you can toggle to either punish an error or even just clue you in that a mistake was made could help keep players on course.

While the lack of a punishment option is a bit unusual, Pictopix has packed in almost every other option you could think of to tinker with the Picross experience. Already mentioned were the many options for hints and how you can fill in spaces, but Pictopix has plenty of display options to change the grid’s appearance and even the ability to stream the game, people in chat able to suggest which squares to fill in and actually do so with specific commands. A robust pictogram puzzle builder allows you build your own image to solve with variable grid sizes, the player able to share them online with there already being hundreds of custom puzzles to play after you’ve exhausted the game’s already hearty built-in package.

 

Not only is the regular Picross play helped by its many options, but there are a few extra modes available that recontexualize the puzzles in interesting ways. Mosaics provide large images that are composites of multiple smaller Picross puzzles, meaning rather than building one recognizable image, the grander image takes shape as you complete level after level. Endless mode provides a sequence of randomly generated but solvable puzzles with nonsense images just to give you a consistent supply of fresh new challenges if you somehow weren’t satisfied by a batch of puzzles that already takes over 40 hours to complete. Lastly, the sprints found in Challenge mode present you with the same random approach to puzzle design but asks you to do a set of them in a short amount of time. While the curated pictures are more interesting than the random modes, they are another interesting way of presenting Picross, and while the mosaics sadly only have three large composite images to work towards at the time of writing, from the time I started the game to the publication of this review there have been updates adding even more to the title to bring it closer to Picross perfection. Besides a more direct form of notification for making an error, it is very hard to suggest anything else that can be added to this pure but option-rich execution of the pictogram puzzle formula.

THE VERDICT: Pictopix is practically a perfect version of traditional Picross. While it could use a notification for when you make an error and some puzzle designs have needless parts, most of Pictopix is all about honing traditional pictogram puzzles into their best form. The different modes and the puzzle creator add extra ways to play the grid puzzles beyond the already robust set of normal levels, the game giving you the tools to customize the game to how you like it and providing ones you might not have ever thought of to boot. Pictopix didn’t aim to reinvent the wheel with its design, instead trying to figure out how to best execute the Picross concept and give you every tool possible to ensure you enjoy it.

 

And so, I give Pictopix for PC…

A GREAT rating. Pictopix certainly scrapes against the ceiling on how good straightforward Picross can be in and of itself. Its only real questionable design elements seem to be the lack of punishment for errors besides reducing your crown rankings without telling you and the few puzzles that feel like they’re trying to trick you with random spots to fill in. For the most part, Pictopix feels like it’s building itself up over time to become closer and closer to perfection, and while that mostly manifests as expanding options, the incredibly generous amount of playable content in a game that already goes at a rather slow and relaxed pace ensures that if you like Picross, you’ll always have one game to go back to to play new puzzles. Maybe they’re the player made ones, maybe they’re the random ones found in the special modes, or maybe you just never finished the main game levels, completed the mosaics, or found the secret puzzles. Whatever the case may be, Pictopix does a superb job of providing the tools needed to tailor the experience just how you like it, and while you can always ask for more mosaics, more skin options, and other areas where more just keeps making the already incredible offerings more abundant, pointing out a problem with the execution is fairly difficult unless the design of pictogram puzzles didn’t click with you already.

 

Picross might just need a strange gimmick to elevate it above the exceptional quality of Pictopix and earn the top rating, or maybe there is still some final element that could help it reach such heights. Whatever the case may be though, Pictopix has certainly done all it can to present its pictogram puzzles in an exemplary way, and anyone who enjoys the Picross experience can at least be confident going in that it has all the mechanical elements of it sealed up tight. It might not have the unique appeals of games like Picross 3D or PictoQuest, but it’s done all it can to provide a dependable, content-rich version of Picross in its purest form.