Pieces (SNES)

The concept of competitive jigsaw puzzle completion might sound a little tepid on its surface, bringing to mind long rounds of people futzing over huge puzzles, but Pieces on the Super Nintendo actually manages to make the concept surprisingly exciting and victories often nail-biting affairs where you barely just gained the edge needed to win.

One way Pieces manages an unusually thrilling approach to completing jigsaw puzzles is by keeping the puzzle size quite small and condensed in the game’s story and multiplayer versus modes. In the one on one duels featured in these two modes you’ll be competing to complete 3 24-piece puzzles as quickly as you can, players able to use either a normal SNES controller to play or the SNES mouse for more precise control. While you might imagine there would be a heavy desire to complete the corner pieces first, you are only presented three pieces you can place at a time. Corner pieces are still going to be the easiest to position of course, but other edge pieces as well as those found in the middle of the jigsaw puzzles don’t have very distinct cuts. When you grab a piece there may be multiple spots on the outlined board it could go just based on its shape, but this actually makes you pay much more attention to the image you’re trying to build. You get to see an image of the complete puzzle before starting a puzzle, but having to rely on your visual memory of the picture you’re working on, pick up the small clues found in the piece’s shape, and prioritize your few available pieces properly makes racing against the other player already a pretty close and quick bit of competition.

What pushes this beyond just a race and into more interesting and high octane territory though is the item system. The speed with which you play your pieces will determine how quickly a special meter fills on the bottom of the screen. As the meter is filled more and more, items will gradually become available to you. The less power in the meter, the less impactful an item will be, but even early on there are some useful tricks to try and gain an edge. Cheaper items tend to be things like activating a “sonar” that will have an arrow pointing to where a piece goes as you move it around the board, and one item will make the completed puzzle appear behind your placed pieces for a time so you can more easily find where a piece goes. Once you start getting a bit higher though you can do more meaningful sabotage like locking your opponent into only having one piece they can place at a time so they might get stumped by a rough one or you can make their cursor’s controls reverse so its harder to quickly place down pieces. If you can get nearly a full meter though, items like the auto complete will appear that will place down a few pieces for you or the Sweeper will appear and start knocking some placed pieces off the opponent’s board. Not every item will appear in a round, but the Syringe is a dangerous curveball that always seems to appear and its use will drain all the power from the opponent’s power meter. Strategy starts to enter this jigsaw puzzle competition as trying to build up to those incredibly strong items can be risky if the opponent whips out the Syringe, and while the weaker items have their uses, they’re not as likely to turn the tides so you have to ask if their benefits might outweigh the gamble of trying to make it to the higher power levels first.

Many games can be decided by the right item usage at the right time, and even if you do start to memorize the puzzles so you can better place the pieces in a hurry, the items allow for battles to be less foregone conclusions since you never quite know what complications the opponent might throw your way. In story mode you’ll be playing against AI opponents who take the form of some fairly silly characters, but whether you’re competing against a crab made out of a rice bowl, a haughty mermaid, or a mean motorbike riding pig, the core puzzle competition is still going to be fairly entertaining. You can start from different difficulty levels which basically lets you skip ahead if you feel the earlier opponents would be too easy, but there is a good climb in capability in the game’s AI to make them eventually become the kinds of tight competition where you will need to get the puzzle piece placement down well in addition to finding just the right time to unleash your items. You can always continue after losing a match although the three puzzles you face will change, but the hardest foes will definitely know when best to whip out the Syringe or use their own high level power-up before you have a Syringe available to sabotage them. For the most part the climb up in difficulty does seem to be a rise in competency, although some of the pre-battle dialogue with characters like a ghost girl imply certain power-ups might not work as well on them. However, by the time you face such a foe in the game’s fairly small roster of opponents, it’s pretty easy to imagine the computer opponent would be capable enough to resist the form of sabotage the character says they can overcome just by the gradual increase in difficulty per foe.

The puzzles featured in Pieces are all sorted under 8 different themes, meaning if you get something like Dinosaurs for your theme during a round, all three puzzles will feature a dinosaur puzzle. Some categories like Animation and ??? have much broader reaches in what they’ll include and can be considered the more difficult options, but it’s not too hard to start to recognize the handful of puzzles in categories like Fighter Planes and Sports if you are trying to train yourself up to be competent enough to beat the toughest story mode AI. The item system allows the game to stay involved even once the puzzles have lost their freshness, but the duels aren’t the only mode on offer either.

While the one versus one play features 24-piece puzzles, the All Play mode shifts that to large puzzles that range from 36 to 60 pieces based on their design and always end up filling the entire screen. These will use the puzzle themes from the other modes but are often the full picture that those puzzles were cropped from, and while sometimes that just means seeing more of an animal’s body, it can reveal a more elaborate picture as well with additional characters or a more expansive background. All Play is named as such though because everyone is working together on this large puzzle, but this is still a competition. Placing a piece correctly earns a player points, the race now to get more correct pieces on the collaborative puzzle than the other players, the game allowing up to five total if you have the multi-tap peripheral. Unfortunately there are no items in this mode, but glowing pieces can appear that will activate a point roulette when placed, granting the player who put it down properly either a good chunk of points or possibly a small point penalty. This guarantees always grabbing the glowing piece won’t be too disruptive, but it’s not the kind of exciting shake-up the items were in the other modes, this perhaps closer to working with other people on a puzzle in real life but with something quantifying how much a person actually contributed to the work.

All Play does have a few settings to try and find its own charms, although their efficacy varies quite a bit. Type A has an eight minute timer and shows a miniature version of the puzzle everyone is working on in the bottom right corner, although since the image is compressed to fit there it can be practically useless in some puzzle designs. It’s easy for getting the broad strokes of something like a recognizable landmark, but one puzzle design has a bunch of cartoon heads crammed together making different expressions that can’t really show in the small preview. This is the game type for All Play that is the most relaxed though, Type B adding a five minute timer that probably won’t pressure players too much but is starting to near that area at least, especially since All Play also carries over the main game’s deliberate deception of many pieces having the same shape so the actual picture on a piece is what is most important. Type C pulls things down to three minutes which would already be a bit tight, but it also throws in fake pieces, and they aren’t really easily spotted fakes either as they look fairly close to the picture pieces needed. It is likely meant to throw off players so the competition is closer, but it mostly just leads to uninteresting confusion as lookalike pieces won’t change enough to be easily spotted. Type D almost could have been the ultimate casual mode in All Play with its lack of a timer, but it contains the ill-conceived false pieces as well that clutter up the selection of five you have at a time. Fake pieces don’t ruin this extra mode though, especially if you’re viewing it more as a competition to earn more points rather than a way to work together on completing puzzles and then seeing who did better, but Type A is lenient enough if you desire more cooperation and Type C could conceivably be the quick competitive mode if you desire either extreme. The duels are definitely the main attraction still, but something more relaxed was a wise inclusion to let you wind down after needing to be so quick and active in the other modes.

THE VERDICT: Completing 24 piece jigsaw puzzles has never been so thrilling. Pieces takes the pretty tame idea of completing jigsaw puzzles and makes it unusually exciting as the items end up crucial to gaining an edge while also having a meter system that makes for important strategic consideration if you want to come out on top. The race to complete three puzzles can end up surprisingly close as every second counts, but Pieces also includes the more relaxed All Play where larger puzzles are completed collaboratively. The point system present in All Play and the weak ideas like false pieces make it far less exciting than the gripping duels of the story and versus modes, but there’s still likely a mode among All Play’s 4 that you can enjoy either as simple puzzle completion fun or a different type of competition.

And so, I give Pieces for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD rating. Funnily enough, All Play’s approach to competitive jigsaw puzzle solving is perhaps closer to the tamer form the imagination conjures up when first hearing the term, and perhaps in some way including that mode prevented the game from disappointing people who did just want to try and put down more pieces in a big puzzle than a friend. Pieces really finds its charm and excitement in the duels though, where the item system not only urges you to complete the puzzle more quickly and focus on doing it efficiently but gives you ways to gain an edge or interfere with your opponent so it truly feels like an interactive competition. Trying to build up to some game-changer only to be hit by a Syringe is the kind of turnaround that sends a surge of unexpected energy into a game that was already asking for some fast action if you wanted to earn up energy at a reasonable pace. 24 piece puzzles feel like a solid size for giving you some wiggle room in edge pieces being easier to place but the the specific cuts of the jigsaw pieces also ensures you need to consider the picture you’re making as well, it never asking for too much close consideration that would slow down the high octane competition but still necessitating attentive play and strategic responsive actions. Some items like the reflecting glass are only used as counters to send the power back at the opponent while others like the simple concept behind Sonar won’t turn the tables even if it helps, but the offerings and the fact that not every item is guaranteed every round does make for interesting considerations that make it more than a matter of being the fastest to place your pieces. It is a system that favors people with better puzzle knowledge and reflexes so items don’t really even the score in skill discrepancies, but either against capable AI or a similarly skilled friend, Pieces’s play can be a lot more layered than you might expect out of such a simple looking game.

All Play could certainly use an item system if it wanted to hit the same highs, although perhaps it could have also aimed to be more casual with just a no pressure jigsaw puzzle to cool off with after the tense play of the duels. Duel mode does offer different timer speeds for how much item power you get so human players can sort of adjust handicaps as needed, but the items can be a bit of a “win more” option if the skill gap is too wide. However, there is definitely a good degree of wiggle room still built into the systems the game offers, allowing for exciting duels and some more relaxed point competitions over in All Play. Pieces does an excellent job with its main premise of spicing up jigsaw puzzle races though, so while not every aspect of it is smooth, it can still easily provide some entertaining duels in an unexpected format.