Sincere flattery

Pepper's Puzzles sometimes feels like it's testing the boundaries of "fair use."

... that aside, it's a hefty picross game. At 240 regular picture puzzles, and 184 more puzzles that form the larger "mosaics," it easily has more pre-baked puzzles than any picross game I've played before.

In terms of puzzle size, it falls a bit short of Paint it Back's 40x30 figure -- maxing out at 35 tiles wide. (The majority of its puzzles seem to be around 20x20 or so.) And like many of its contemporaries, I'd bet that it could go bigger if only it had figured out a good "zoom" mechanic; i.e., puzzle size appears restricted mainly by the screen resolution.

It hurts a tiny bit that Pepper's Puzzles is Windows-only; I really would have liked to churn out some pictures on the couch, with my Powerbook.

Pepper has some cool things going for her: the time trials are a neat (though short-lived) feature, and a puzzle creator plus Steam Workshop integration is something I've previously referred to as "pretty dope." ... but it still feels slightly inferior, to me, largely because of its maximum puzzle bounds.

As impressed as I was by how many puzzles Pepper threw at me, only one or two of its puzzles ever felt individually challenging (like Paint it Back's did). And as neat as its new features are, they didn't have much of an impact on my gameplay experience (compared with Picrozelda's number-grouping mechanic).

So I wouldn't call it a bar-raising picross package. But, if you want an absolute fuckload of puzzles, Pepper's got you covered.

Better than: InfiniPicross, Pokémon Picross
Not as good as: My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, Paint it Back
That should probably be enough nonograms: for the rest of 2018.

Progress: 922/922 stars.