Bork

Puppy Cross has a cute premise - completing nonograms of dogs (and cats!) to let them frolic around a garden - and a hefty amount of puzzles backing it up. Even if the customization aspect of the garden is kinda shallow, finishing all the puzzles feels like its own reward.

It even has one of the best quality-of-life improvements I've seen in a nonogram game: once you've marked all the right cells in a row or column, the "X" cells are filled in automatically. This is a pretty great time-saving convenience that streamlines the flow to the next row or column.

Unfortunately, Puppy Cross's strengths are dulled by some unpolished fundamentals. Like disorienting puzzle progression: you need to complete a "world" before moving on to the next, but each world's first puzzles are an order of magnitude easier than the preceding world's last puzzles!

Even though there's barely any text in the game, it suffers from a clear and frequent localization/grammar error. Every completed puzzle unlocks a new item, but they accidentally a word in this messaging:

... and then there are the input problems.

• Click-and-drag can select multiple cells in a row or column, but if you drag past the edge of the puzzle, the input is lost. So filling to the end of a row/column requires more precision than it should.
• Meanwhile, click-and-drag can "X" cells outside of the current row and column, but can only un-"X" one cell at a time. It's easy to "X" more cells than you meant to, and hard to remove those marks afterward.
• Maybe worst of all, mouse-clicks are ignored until animations have stopped playing. Every time you return to the puzzle menu, you can't select a new puzzle - or even get any visual feedback on your input - until the go-to-garden button has finished fading-in, several annoying seconds later.

Much as I appreciate the game's amount of content and its thorough hinting system, the input issues are fairly critical. Puppy Cross is certainly playable, but hard to recommend over more basically-functional nonogram games.

Better than: Pokémon Picross
Not as good as: Nonogram - The Greatest Painter
Dog and cat puns not as good as: Cat Quest

Progress: 100%