Even as someone who likes picross quite a bit, getting through the puzzles became more of a chore than something I wanted to do, and it highlights the problem with doing this concept; pacing is very, very hard to get right. In the 4th chapter, specifically, there were some moments where you're just sat there thinking "I would literally not have enough time to solve a picross puzzle in this scenario." It doesn't help that, story-wise, there's really only two threads that run across chapters, one of which breezes by and never really gets the screen time it deserved. Keep in mind that I'm coming at this more from a Prof. Layton or Danganronpa perspective and not a Phoenix Wright one; I know those games' chapters are more unrelated to one another than something like Danganronpa, but it still feels like for most of the game the story isn't really going anywhere, and halfway through the last case the game says "we need to bring all of this together, so let's do that now."

I realize it probably sounds like I don't like this game given all of the shitting on it I've just done, but I still do think this is an alright game. It's weaker in story than I expected, but it's a solid picross game, and that's gotta count for something, right?

why do i have to be rude to my friends

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year and a half later edit (not really a proper review just organizing some thoughts i have about nitw and a similar game):
been thinking about this one a lot recently. not because i've really changed my opinion or love it now, but because it feels like such wasted potential. forgive me if this one is hard to read, my thoughts about this game are very tangled and laying them out in a way that makes sense is difficult

one of my favorite games of all time, echo (a free vn basically no one has played but i digress), has nearly all the same building blocks as night in the woods. you've got:
-vaguely a coming of age story
-about coming back to your rural dead-end hometown from college
-reuniting with your old friend group, hanging out & talking with them
-you get to choose who to hang out with & get different content based on who you pick
-a member of the friend group is gone, you progressively figure out what happened to them and why
-pretty gay and pretty "indie furry", in a way that deters a lot of the people not in the target demographic from ever trying it.

i could go on but i won't because that would land itself in spoiler territory for one or both, but if you've played both they should reveal themselves to be very similar in premise. there's enough differences to matter but my point is that they're 2 games that are so easy to compare to one another that one could do it with nothing but the first sentence of each game's product descriptions. so why do i love echo as much as i do, and not really care for nitw as much as i do? for me, the answer lies entirely within execution.

thought 1: i feel like the biggest sticking point for me is how nitw handles emotion, that being, it barely does. which for a game all about talking to people is pretty bad! often the most you'll get is a character narrowing or opening their eyes a bit more and dryly delivering an "oh my god" or a "no fucking way", but the character sprites barely emote, and there's no descriptive text that lets you fill in the details. echo at least has your standard neutral/happy/angry/etc visual novely sprites for each character, but where that game shines is in its text descriptions. the combination of these two does wonders for the believability of that game's world and its characters--it's really no wonder why so many games about talking to people opt for a visual novel format. contrast that to nitw, where every character talks like they're texting one another. people don't talk like this, they type like this, which is a very important distinction to be made, and i couldn't help but be pulled out of the experience any time i noticed it.

thought 2: night in the woods often emphasizes the fact that possum springs is a dead end town no one really wants to live in, but aside from the text there's really nothing backing it up. for a town as "shitty" as everyone thinks it is, it looks way too pleasant to exist within. night in the woods is simply too pretty for what it's going for. if you want to say that the game is actually about how this small town isn't actually that bad, might i point you to some plot beats that happen in the story that directly contradict that? contrast that to echo, which isnt nearly as wishy-washy about how it wants to present the town; it's oppressively hot, most of the houses are vacant or abandoned, everything is barren or messy or grimy or all of the above, the game goes the whole nine yards. the refuge from this is in the friendships the mc has formed, and when things go badly you can't just escape to "oh look at how pretty the game is", it's all laid bare in a way you can't ignore. night in the woods clearly wants to tug on your emotional strings, but it's missing any sort of bite, which leads me pretty cleanly to my next point...

thought 3: to me, night in the woods feels conflicted in what it wants to be. nitw is a cozy game where you hang out with your friends but it's also a game that delves into the troubles that can befall a freindship, particularly in bea's events (i will mention that i only played one or two of greggs when i played the game so i can't really comment on them). this is all good and fine, but the issue is that the game is too scared to let go of the "cozy" descriptor, so things happen that should have an effect on the dynamics of the friend group, but end up changing basically nothing. i'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but regardless of whether you choose to hang out with bea or gregg, the narrative converges towards the same point in the end as a plot starts to take center focus. this unintentionally kind of says that it doesn't really matter what you say to the people around you and if you never hang out with them, that they'll still be your friends, which feels... wrong? like that can't be what they're going for, right? mae is allowed to be at best a total klutz and at worst actively malicious towards the people around her and no one really minds all that much in the long run.

it all comes down to narrative goals; night in the woods tells the player "it's ok to be confused about life in your early 20s" but there's so many extraneous elements that this idea is often shoved to the wayside. once the plot gets going it's basically completely gone as a theme. contrast this with echo, which, to be vague as to not thematically spoil it, has an undercurrent of "trauma" that the game carries across large thematic and tonal shifts. almost nothing in echo feels like a convenient accident despite how wildly different some of the routes can be from one another, whereas night in the woods, to me, feels like a collage of a bunch of different ideas thrown together with little thought put into their cohesion.

for most people these issues are ignorable, for me they're not. had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly this game failed to resonate with me at all, but after i saw a game going for something kinda similar do it with flying colors, it's led me to thinking about it again. only real reason i wrote this is that i mostly just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game now that ive got a good grasp on them lol