It's Picross, so it has the sauce.

Look, there's only so many ways to talk about Picross. I mean, I've played probably three dozen nonogram games at this rate, and I keep finding out about more and more keep coming out, I only have so much to say.

This one has the benefit of having a story, established characters, and humor. I wasn't terribly interested in any of that because I mostly wanted to just play Picross, but the characters are decent for what it's worth, and I had some chuckles. I haven't played the main Khimera game yet - it's free and I have it downloaded so it's only a matter of time - but the characters felt comfortable enough in this game.

I have three complaints about this game, however. First, one that only applies to this game, then one that applies to most nonogram games, and third a unique issue with this game that might apply to others.

For the one that only affects this game, I feel like I'm rarely making an actual image by solving the puzzles. It's a little hard to explain, but in another Picross game, the picture that I made by solving the puzzle feels clear even before the tiles are colored in, but here, the pictures feel nonsensical and the colored-in image looks way different. It doesn't really matter since I'm not truly trying to figure out what I'm filling in until after I already solved it, but still, it feels like the solution comes out of nowhere.

The second complaint is something I see it practically every nonogram game that isn't Jupiter's Picross games. It's... very hard to describe with and without a visual aid and would only bother Picross vets like myself, but still. There are times where the game will tell you what specific number you filled in without the player being able to know what they filled in with just the information in that line. That probably doesn't make sense so let me use an example.

Let's say you're doing a 15x15 puzzle and the line you're looking at has the numbers 1 1 2 1. Now let's say you put a tile in the third spot on that line because you know thanks to other lines that that tile can be filled in, and then you put an x on both sides of that tile. It's the third tile of line so you know that it has to be one of the first two "1s" of the line, it cannot be the two, and that's why you put the x around it. However, given the space on the right side of the filled-in tile, you are not yet sure if this tile is the first "1" or the second "1". Yet this game, and other games like it, already knows if it's the first or second "1" and it'll darken it out. So if it's the second "1" it'll darken out the second number in the sequence (1 1 2 1). You, the player, have no way of actually knowing it was the second "1" given the information you already have, but the game acts as if you do, which gives you more help than you should presently have available.

I don't know if that makes sense at all. As I said, it's hard in just words, but it's a persistent issue in these games, Jupiter seems to be the only developer to get it right. Another thing Jupiter gets right that other devs don't is its hint system. By default in Jupiter's Picross games, they'll have an option turned on where the game will highlight rows/columns where you have more possible moves to make with the information you currently have. I always turn this option off because I don't want the extra help, but it's a great feature for new players - I probably wouldn't have gotten into Picross without it. Other nonogram games don't tend to have this feature. This one... does in a limited and confusing capacity.

Let's say you are looking at a line with the numbers 1 5 2. Now lets say you've filled in the line like so (dots are a tile filled in, underscores are unfilled tiles): . _ _ . . . _ . _ _ . .
Apologies if this doesn't make sense visually, I don't know how else to put it. But anyway, looking at this information, you have the "1" and the "2" filled out already, and even though you don't have it filled in yet, you know you must fill in the seventh tile in that sequence in order to finish the "5". In Picross, this would be represented by the row turning blue; the "1" and "2" would be darkened out, but the "5" will be blue, the game's way in telling you there's a move you can do. In Khimera, instead of turning the line a different color, the game will un-darken the two numbers you already figured out, so now the whole number sequence (1 5 2) are lit up again despite the fact you've done nothing wrong. This is confusing because the game does this if you've fucked up or if there's a number to finish filling in, which makes it confusing. Why not just have different colors to highlight the rows and columns when there's new information for that line?

Well, this is definitely my most incomprehensible review, and awfully negative for a five-star game. Look, I just kinda give all nonogram games five stars, it would have to be a truly bad nonogram game for me to rate it lower. In reality, I think Picross truly is the peak of nonogram games, and pretty much all others have issues that Jupiter's games simply don't. At the end of the day, though, they're still Picross and I love this shit.

After playing the prior Khimera game a few years back, I told myself that it was good enough for a free game that I'd be down for whatever the developers did next. It's a good thing I like picross!
Altogether a decent picross implementation, but there are a few minor issues. Surrounding a group of filled-in boxes with "no" marks will at times tell you which number that group corresponds to, even if you haven't filled in enough boxes in that row or column to actually prove that you know that it corresponds to that number for sure; other versions of picross, like any nintendo version, would not give you this information. This makes it kind of a lot easier than any version I've played before, even without using any assist items (which, given the achievement and incentive structures, feel like they're meant for the Mosaic side mode instead of the "critical path").
"Pacing" also feels like an issue. With few exceptions, the sets of levels generally increase the size of the puzzles you have to solve as you progress. This means that if you progress through the puzzles in the default order, you go from puzzles that take a few seconds at the very beginning of the game, to puzzles that take about 12 minutes each, on the lower end (and I was going pretty fast with them - gold ranks on these late puzzles are something like 20 minutes each). Consequently, the end of the story kind of feels like it drags, just because the puzzles themselves are all substantially longer, with no shorter puzzles to break them up. Not a huge issue, just a thing I noticed.

'Khimera: Puzzle Island' is a spin-off of Suits & Sandals' 2D platformer debut that takes place after its events, being a nonogram game with cutscenes. This implementation is novel to me and suggests a certain malleability of genre that the studio is willing to explore, even if the implementation plays much the same as any other nonogram game. It's refreshing to see puzzle games with a 'campaign' and a beginning-to-end that goes beyond the hitting of a brick wall ('Pictopix') or a milquetoast story ('PictoQuest: The Cursed Grids').

As a nonogram game, it is extremely basic. You are given a hundred levels split across six courses that comprise the main story, plus four bonus 'mosaic' panels to fill out. You have the ability to pick up or buy items to aide you, and this alongside your swiftness with solving the puzzles can determine the payout or items you need to use. I, admittedly, never used any of these items and I completed each campaign completely flawlessly. This is likely due entirely to the fact that I've become proficient at nonograms to a point that items would be more of an impeding force than a helping one. I suspect beginners to nonograms will find this much more of a challenge.

Speaking from experience, though, there are certain auto-enabled mechanics that somewhat irked me—chief of which is that you can cheese out a lot of individual points within a puzzle by plugging numbers in and having the corresponding number be either rendered solved or unsolved. I suspect this was switched on by default due to its permissiveness, but it also allows for rather sloppy and somewhat cheat-y solving that makes me hesitate to call this game a good option for beginners. It enables "improper nonogram etiquette", as it were. Though, this being a setting as opposed to a locked feature does assuage me somewhat.

The campaign's story is the exact fashion of quirky but humble conversational humor that 'Destroy All Monster Girls' employed, just put a lot more up-front. I like the characters, I like the mild prodding that K1tsudon makes at gaming and streaming culture, I like the subtle implication that Chelshia is queer toward the villain in chapter six. It's endearing, which is a description applicable to most of this game: It's an endearing story-based puzzle game about girls fucking around on an island. Whether you like it or not will depend almost entirely on your patience with nonograms and similar pen-and-paper style games, but for me it was definitely a positive experience and a good way to kill time.

It's picross, and it's good, what else do you want? There's story, different modes, rewards and a shop to buy collectibles/hints from.

There is one weird thing I've noticed and it does seem that if you activate help with greying out numbers on a column/row once they are entered, computer sometimes helps a bit too much? It's a little hard to put it into words, but I've tested it a few times, and it seems AI responsible for crossing out numbers in the given column or row will actually fill out the correct number even if the player should have no idea which is it. Say you have a row of three 1s, and you know that one of them is somewhere in the middle? Most other games wouldn't grey out numbers from the middle of the board, but here, once you cover it around with X marks, the system might grey out the first 1 of the row of numbers, suggesting that, indeed, all the other ones come later to the right. It's a bit unfortunate since I'm trying not to use hints of any kind, but they seem to just appear sometimes.

Even aside from that, I wouldn't call this game hard. The game's got plenty of puzzles that help you along the perimeter first, so if you're a hardcore nonogram player, I doubt you'll find much challenge.

This might seem a bit negative, but only because it's a particular curiosity I found in this game and in no other titles of this genre I've played, and what else can you say about picross? It's the puzzle you know and presumably love, and if you don't, this seems like a great starting point due to its ease (granted, I've skipped the tutorial, so can't really say if it goes into great detail). Amazing music, cute visuals, pretty funny story that's not too long and can be skipped if you're not into it, and even some sense of progression if you don't just want to stare at one list of 300 puzzles and need some sense of pace.