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.
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.