This takes elements from Picross and simplifies them in most cases. Other than on the shikaku puzzles you can usually breeze through the puzzles without a whole lot of thought, but honestly I’m kind of fine with that. This is just a good chill out, play while listening to a podcast, or while you have a free five minutes sort of game. It’s also perfect to play on a phone with one hand, so it’s ticking all the boxes I’m looking for in a phone game these days.

The shikaku puzzles go in the other direction, unfortunately, where they do require some real thought, but as far as I’ve been able to discern, there’s no real strategies to solving them (like you’d have in Picross), making it a long series of trial and error actions. I lost interest in these pretty quickly, especially as they don’t have any art once they’re complete either. I think the design of the regular puzzles’ art is delightful, so that’s another point for them.

A game similar to picross with a very nice aesthetic. It's less of a puzzle game and more of a "zone out" game - not what I was looking for. Tiles will have a number on them, and you have to stitch that many tiles of the same color connected to that tile. Since you can only stitch rectangles and squares (and not all kinds of shapes, like in Piczle Lines and similar games), there are only so many different ways to solve a puzzle and they all pretty much feel the same. For example, when you see a 3, 5, or a 7, you know that can only be a straight line. This is why even the "brain twister" puzzles are very easy. The game tries to increase the difficulty with some puzzles that are very large, but as you are only given one small section of a puzzle to solve at a time, this doesn't add challenge - it only adds tedium.

Well, Stitch. is not ~really a puzzle game. There's little to think about, even on the highest difficulty. It's moreso a game where you can just let your brain go on autopilot and relax. Because the things it needs to get right - giving the stitching a tactile feel and creating a calming sensory landscape - it absolutely does. Your enjoyment of this game is mostly dependent on your expectation: If you want a good puzzle game, look elsewhere. If you want a good way to wind down for 30min a day, it might be a good choice to pick this one up.

🇬🇧 full review | 🇧🇷 resenha completa

É fácil ver qual é o público-alvo de stitch. já quando completa o primeiro nível do jogo. O objetivo deles não era criar uma versão digital de Shikaku para especialistas, mas usar as incríveis regras desse puzzle para fazer um jogo relaxante e visualmente atraente para pessoas que gostam de desligar o cérebro com esse tipo de desafio. Como fã declarado de Picross, só posso dizer que esses Hoops também se tornaram os meus favoritos, e só espero continuar costurando por muito mais noites antes de dormir. (Sim, estou pedindo a sequência, termino esses jogos rápido, sabe...)

Would be easy to just throw praise at this cleverly done mix of embroidery and picross but I do have some genuine gripes with this game:

- the difficulty
The difficulty is usually relatively low, especially if you are quite experienced in nonograms, because the puzzles are always split into small fragments, so no matter how big the puzzles are, you are usually just doing small fragments for a longer time.

- the size of the puzzles
Speaking of the size, the puzzles usually take a long time and if you finish a small fragment quickly you have to watch the same, long, kinda clunky animation that takes you to the next one with no option of skipping, yikes.

- no ability to "sketch" smaller parts
The game only accepts the length the number requires, you can't place a 1 block part in the middle to do the obvious move, as you would do picross, instead the game requires you to submit the right size before placing the next blocks.

Other than that, good job guys. Keep up the good puzzle games for Apple Arcade.