Playing A Game Nonogram - The Greatest Painter PC

I found the problem with Nonogram.

The "Classic" puzzles are big, right? I got up to a 70 x 40 puzzle. That's big. But as Nonogram's puzzles get bigger, its technical issues become harder to ignore.

When ex-ing out or filling in a bunch of squares in sequence - as one is likely to do in a large puzzle - the game often hitches for several seconds at a time. One moment, you'll be dragging the cursor along a row; then suddenly, visual feedback stops; then three seconds later, it'll catch up again, and you'll be unsure how many boxes got filled. And then, because of how many boxes you filled, it'll likely hitch again pretty soon.

This is annoying, but not breaking; the breaking issue I encountered was in trying to correct a logical flaw in that 70 x 40 puzzle. I jammed on the Undo button to revert to a known-good state, and after a certain amount of undos (admittedly, quite a few) the game crashed displaying a "gc" error.

Clearly, something very memory-inefficient is going on each time a square is clicked. These allocations pile up, and eventually fragment the game's heap to a critical point, upon which the game has no choice but to wait on some garbage collection. (I'm guessing that's what the hitching is about.) And when the Undo/Redo history is invoked too frequently, the garbage collector can no longer keep up. Boom.

But the real problem, the icing on this crash-cake, is that there's no autosave. That crash lost me 45 minutes of puzzle-solving. This wasn't my first crash, either, and I just assume it would continue recurring in similar circumstances.

I might have been willing to put up with Nonogram's technical infidelity if it at least saved my progress. But it doesn't, so I can't.

It's a shame, because otherwise, Nonogram is a great implementation of picross puzzling. Its UX is the best I've ever seen, and its puzzle gallery might be, too. If only it didn't crash and lose progress.

Better than: InfiniPicross
Not as good as: Paint it Back, Pepper's Puzzles
Just because you're using Unity to make checkbox puzzles: doesn't mean that you can ignore your memory usage.

Progress: 126/126 Gallery, 13/50 Classic, 35/50 Speed

Rating: Good