Pic-a-Pix Deluxe

released on Jan 04, 2018

Pic-a-Pix are exciting logic puzzles that form whimsical pixel art pictures when solved. Pic-a-Pix are sometimes known by other names, such as Picross, Nonogram, Paint by Numbers, Griddlers, Hanjie and many more.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

All puzzles completed with medals awarded, including both base game puzzles and the bundled "black and white pack". Essentially Picross by another name, there's a good amount of content included in this base package (300 puzzles, with 150 colour and 150 black and white) which will certainly last for a while, and the larger puzzles present a decent challenge. With an accessible interface and a potentially handy error-checking function for those who want to use it, this is a good implementation of the genre.

“An Alright Block Puzzler”

For a simple puzzle game on the Nintendo Switch, “Pic-A-Pix Deluxe” sure packs a lot of content under the hood. It’s not a game that tries anything particularly new in the genre, and it doesn’t expand its own ideas much at all throughout subsequent levels, but it's a decent time-waster that lets you rack your brain a bit. I would’ve preferred some gameplay twists added to the mix to spice things up, or some unlockables to give a greater sense of progression, but it is a fine title in its own right.

Puzzles revolve around completing portraits of things/animals by abiding to the rules set forth in each row/column. You have to deduce which colors go where, and eventually you’ll be able to complete each level pretty efficiently. They do get more complicated as time goes on, but not so much in terms of difficulty - rather, they just start taking forever to finish. This gameplay loop just doesn’t have a lot of depth with the way the game decides to use it, and I wish more aspects were added in order to change things up. There’s a very generous helping of levels, so if you don’t find the game boring you could find yourself playing for months.

This game has some addicting aspects to it early on, but it doesn’t really shake things up at all. It’s a solid puzzler with a simple gameplay loop, but it needed some unlockables or different types of levels in order to keep things interesting. I would personally Not Recommend this one due to its cheap price tag and simple puzzle style. If this formula was tweaked it would result in something greater…

Final Verdict: 5/10 (Average)

the numbers get pretty hard to read on a switch lite at larger puzzle sizes - in particular, once a color chunk is detected as 'complete' (and it becomes a number written in that color on a white background) it can be very difficult to discern what color it was, and i suspect this'd be a problem even on a larger screen. also like two or three of the 35x25 puzzles at the end were bugged and not correctly detecting completed sections in certain rows (can still be finished, just annoying)

there's a charmingly amateurish or perhaps 'programmer art' quality to a lot of the finished pieces that i really enjoy though – they're not badly done, there's just a certain goofy looseness to the style that i find charming