Playing A Game PictoQuest: The Cursed Grids PC

"Moonface" is a not-in-polite-company term, right? Like, I could've sworn it was an outright slur. At any rate, it doesn't sound quite right.

PictoQuest doesn't seem like it's trying to offend, though; its translation just has a few rough spots. And other than that, the game is well-polished and mechanically solid: input handling works great (so much better than Puppy Cross's), puzzles get up to a reasonable size (20x20), and it doesn't screw around with nonsense like making you re-play a puzzle if you make a mistake.

Unfortunately the interesting parts of PictoQuest, the "quest" parts, are underwhelming. There's no story other than the establishment of ... the aforementioned villain. There's a world map with distinct regions, but your path through it is a line; one puzzle is available at a time, with the exception of a few optional side-puzzles.

Some puzzles are made up like combat encounters with stereotypical enemies, such as bats or blobs -- they'll "attack" you if you make a mistake or let their attack meter fill up, and you'll "attack" them each time you solve a row or column. Attacking the monster also pushes its attack meter back. ... in other words, you win combat by solving the puzzle with a soft time limit.

There are a small handful of combat items which can reveal parts of the puzzle (i.e. cheating the game) or slow down enemies, and you'll pick these items up gradually or can buy them using money (which also accumulates from solving puzzles). But if you're able to solve nonograms in general, these items are entirely unnecessary.

The "combat" side of a puzzle only becomes even remotely challenging when some of the biggest, 20-by-20 puzzles take a while to fill enough blocks for an entire row or column. And it would still be a stretch to call those puzzles difficult.

When you ignore its thin adventure-like elements, PictoQuest ends up being a relatively short nonogram game. Not, like, disastrously short; I just mean it's a far cry from Pictopix in terms of content.

PictoQuest isn't a bad nonogram game, but there are plenty of better ones. And its attempted integration of RPG/adventure aspects doesn't really pay off.

Better than: Picross Fairytale, Pokémon Picross, Puppy Cross
Not as good as: Murder by Numbers, Paint it Back, Pepper's Puzzles
Lackluster quest-ing on par with: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

Progress: 100%

Rating: Meh