Luna Story: A Forgotten Tale

Luna Story: A Forgotten Tale

released on Nov 14, 2016

Luna Story: A Forgotten Tale

released on Nov 14, 2016

Why don’t you travel to a sentimental and beautiful story hidden in the puzzle? Nonograms are also well-known as griddlers, hanjie, picross, pictocross or kakuro. These are classic Japanese crosswords with hidden pictures.


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Cute little nonagram game! It's pretty straightforward, divvying its puzzles into 'Normal' and 'Big', with the latter being a series of puzzles that each form a small part of a larger pixel art image. There are 24 total 'Big' puzzles, each one consisting of up to 100 smaller puzzles, so you're going to be here a while if you go for 100% completion. I actually did find it quite worthwhile to do so - there's a simple but nice little story that's slowly revealed through the 'Big' puzzles, and 100% completion rewards the player for seeing it through. Very nice little diversion.

I really only have this and Mario's Super Picross as reference for nonagrams, so I don't really know what sort of things are endemic to the genre. I must admit that I had some issues with this that I didn't have with Super Picross. A lot of the 'Normal' puzzles are variations on a theme - there are probably a dozen or so different types of flowers, for example. This sort of works thematically given the game's motif of a lunar garden, but I did fall into a cadence with each set of Normal puzzles, waiting for the inevitable one the game simply labeled 'flower'. There are some translation issues as well - nothing serious, the narrative's intent comes through clearly enough, but you can tell English isn't the primary language for the writer.

The main things I did have issues with were positioning and repetition. There's an odd choice made with some of the pictures in some of the 'Normal' puzzles where the image is not lined up down the middle, mostly as a consequence of putting a picture with an even-numbered pixel width in an odd-numbered pixel grid, or vice-versa. A big thing I fell into with Super Picross was pattern recognition with symetric graphics, so this uneven positioning throws things off a bit. Meanwhile, there are a LOT of repeated shapes in the 'Big' puzzles, mostly down to the use of background elements like stars that you repeatedly have to carve out. I was initially on-board with this - like I said, pattern recognition was one of my main tools in my last nonagram game - but the game does this trick SO many times that it starts to remove the challenge and visual artistry behind it. I should think that creating a compelling collage-type puzzle in the context of a nonagram is very difficult, and falling on something like putting hundreds of stars for the player to fill out over thousands of individual puzzles is a necessity - but I wouldn't have minded more variation to keep things interesting. I think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it did get pretty distracting by the end.

But like I said, it is worth playing to 100% completion. Just take your time with this one and don't rush it if you don't wanna.

Well it took years and like three startovers because I'm apparently addicted to breaking my phone... but I'm done...
The puzzle design and the translation are a bit janky but it's a solid enough picross game.

i've dumped so many god damn hours into this thing and I'm still probably under 10% done, pretty good phone nonogram game but do not play this one if you want a sense of completion lol

I don't usually play mobile games but I've been having to see doctors pretty often lately but this has helped keep my anxiety in check while I'm in waiting rooms trying not to be stressed about the disaster that is the American healthcare system.

Although since I have an older/smaller phone, it makes the bigger puzzles hard/almost impossible to do. But there's enough of the smaller size ones that I still have plenty to work through.

Pleasant lil game.

i came away with mixed feelings and it's admittedly a bit janky (including being able to be penalized for the 'mistake' of mistapping to fill in a box within a nonexistent row/column just outside the grid) but the aesthetics are rather nice (even if they are put above legibility) and the puzzles are generally good (the normal ones, at least; the multi-puzzle mosaics are mostly just extremely repetitive