Quick Reviews: Non-stop Nonograms

In our most recent episode, S3E11, we covered Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross, two nonogram games that may have served as an introduction to the genre for many. While they're new to me, nonograms are a genre of puzzle game that I do find myself playing a lot of. Over the last couple months, especially because of our nonogram episode, I've been playing through a lot more of these games, so this time I'm covering four nonogram-based games: Piczle Cross Adventure, Murder by Numbers, Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum, and Piczle Cross: Rune Factory.

For those that aren't familiar with it, and haven't checked out our episode yet, in a nonogram there is a grid with numbers on the side... these numbers indicate how many squares in that row or column need to be filled in. For example, the numbers 1, 3, and 1 would indicate that there has to be a filled in square, then a gap, then three filled in squares, another gap, and then a filled in square, all in that order. When the whole puzzle is completed, there's a picture of some fashion revealed by the solution.

Piczle Cross Adventure

Piczle Cross Adventure comes from Japanese-based indie developer Score Studios and was released in 2020, and which I first talked about during our Feb 26, 2025 Lite Switch episode when I had been playing this for the first time on Steam. Like many of the games I'm covering in this entry, there's a core element of a nonogram but then there's some sort of additional gameplay or other interest to make it a bit richer of an experience. In this case, it bills itself as a "a story-driven, RPG-style 2D graphical adventure". At the core of it is, due to some general mad scientist chaos, items being turned into black and white pixels and so the challenge is to find all the effected items, solve the puzzles, and turn them back.

The world map is split up into regions with a number of nonograms to find and solve on each screen. Some of these are quite easy to see, and some take a bit of sleuthing around. The puzzles all generally felt fairly straight forward, and while there's some story and exploration involved in it, most of the game time goes into the puzzles themselves. The whole game, for me, took just under 24 hours to 100%. Still, while most of the time is in the puzzles, I do appreciate the sense of humour that the characters bring into this and so I find this a lot of fun in the little bits that appear between the puzzles. That starts with the introduction and continues through the entire rest of the game. It keeps some fun in this in between puzzles and breaks things up.

To pace the gameplay, there's a leveling system that mostly means that in order to advance beyond a screen, one must have first completed most of the puzzles on that screen (or, I think, sometimes the screens that led up to it). As more puzzles are completed, the player levels up and so the large puzzles that block movement (blocked cars and the like) require reaching certain levels. This does a good job of slowing the pace through the storyline, though for myself I would've completed those as I went anyway. Those that I could find, anyway... there's a couple times where small puzzles were quite hard to find.

It ends up with, I think, a pretty solid storyline and I found myself just as invested in the plot as I was invested in the puzzles. And there's other touches I like, such as a pretty nice painting of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II at one point. The whole game ended up being a fun, solid nonogram entry and Score Studios will be worth keeping in mind.

Murder by Numbers

Murder by Numbers comes from British developer Mediatonic and was also released in 2020. The game starts off surprisingly strong because I really wasn't expecting the animated intro that the game leads off with, and there's something I found really charming about it. It's the kind of introduction that makes me want more of this just to have that intro more times.... possibly an animated show. It is also a bit interesting to me that while this is a British developer, the whole thing is basically set in the greater Los Angeles area.... still, the only time that's an issue really is one map, and the rest of the game is divided into four chapters.

There's a whole lot of plot here, as you're an actress on a show that tries to solve a murder after someone tied to the show is killed. And then the gameplay is a combination of solving nonograms to identify clues and talking to everyone else, your friends, the suspects, the cops, and so on. There's a strong feel of point and click puzzles in this as well, because there's a whole lot of this that's just showing various items to various people both to get all the dialogue and to advance the plot. Which does lead, actually, to both criticisms I have with the game. The first is that because of how much dialogue there is, and how many questions to ask, it was really frustrating to have to loop back through dialogue. There's no way to skip through dialogue that you've already seen or just get back to the questions to ask, and with having to repeat things, either of those would've been a big improvement in quality of life.

The other issue is that there's one spot, and only one spot, where a puzzle was easily missable and you actually have to leave a screen and go find a puzzle and solve it before the story advances (I never had to do this anywhere outside of chapter 3 - and if you're here because you can't get rank S on it, check out this Steam thread about it). This would be annoying enough for the completionists if I was just messing with 100%ing the game, but I think the bigger issue with it is the game's structure. The sidekick here is a robot named SCOUT who has lost their memory, and the grade you get on each chapter depends on completing all the puzzles with no hints, and to get a rank S you can't miss any puzzles. The higher the rank, the more bonus puzzles you get access to. Complete all the bonus puzzles and you get cut scenes for SCOUT's backstory. I ended up replaying chapter 3 twice until I finally had found the right thing on that level to get it up to rank S.

With the amount of redoing I had to do, it took me over 31 hours to complete Murder by Numbers, but with some better quality of life stuff (skippable dialogue and no missable and hard to find puzzle) it would've taken a handful of hours less. Still, I do like the story and the characters and that intro. I sorta want to say "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" but that feels just a touch too harsh. It has the potential, there's just a couple small things that I wish had been fixed before this was out the door. I feel like another game wouldn't be out of the question here, so I think it could be a lot stronger with a couple small fixes.

Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum

Now we move into a couple game that are tie-ins with things I don't know anything about and that I played just because I want... no, I NEED more nonograms. The game itself comes from Jupiter Corporation just a few months ago in June 2025, the company that developed the Nintendo Picross series, including both Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross. Apparently, they can't actually use the Picross number on their other projects and so we end up with the Pixel Museum. The other part of this is the Juufuutei Raden part of this, who is apparently a Japanese VTuber, which is a whole thing I'm not going to pretend to fully understand. What is relevant here is that all the puzzles take place in a museum, where each puzzle is an exhibit, and so Juufuutei Raden serves as a bit of a guide through the museum.

The puzzles in this one were a lot more customizable than I'd expected, and so you can really easily play this with a lot of extra tools or just a few. For example, there's a setting that will highlight in blue every row where there's progress that can currently be made and you can also check at any point to see if there are any wrong answers (and of course, also a way to get hints at the very start with some starting points filled in). Unlike other nonogram games, there also doesn't appear to be any penalty to using those features and a completion is a completion. They can also be turned on and off during a puzzle... so one can do something like flip on the markers for which rows can be worked on. I'd feel bad about it if not for how on the second room of this game they throw a very difficult 30x40 puzzle and that is a total pain to count and super susceptible to miscounting.

Once the puzzle is completed, we have both a description of the exhibit in the style one would expect from a museum that can be read, and there's also spoken commentary on the exhibits from Juufuutei (in Japanese) with an English translation. These actually do end up being really interesting and fairly meaty, so there's a really natural break between puzzles and this actually does feel pretty educational. I could even see this being more interesting for someone learning Japanese since there's spoken Japanese with English translations throughout. There's also a fair amount about Japan in here, though after the first level that is very Japanese, I'm now working my way through European artwork.

The commentary on the artwork is actually fairly interesting, and it does show a lot of work went into this. I do also appreciate the ability to compare the puzzle solution and the actual artwork. And in some cases, also close-ups of particular points of interest in the artwork. Of all four nonogram games, even though this has some of the hardest puzzles I've played, it also feels like it's the most relaxing. I like that this feels educational as well as challenging. It's really satisfying in that regard. Honestly, I was playing this for the puzzles and wasn't expecting the non-puzzle part of this to hook me this much. I'm 10 hours in and looking forward to a lot more.

Piczle Cross: Rune Factory

Score Studios returns to the list with their release from February 2025, Piczle Cross: Rune Factory. Confidentially, I have no idea what Rune Factory is... and after 20 hours of playing this, I still don't know. I think a farm is involved somehow, but I'm really not sure in what way. Unlike Piczle Cross Adventure, I really haven't seen any of the more fun story elements that are what made me want to check out another Piczle Cross game. So that's a bit disappointing.

To the game's credit, though, this does really kick up the customization options and the game makes it a pretty clear point that there's a ton of customization options to explore. And while I don't bother with a lot of the assists this provides, I do really appreciate these nonogram games that have the achievements more about completion than about things like racing against the clock. The puzzles are hard enough that I like not feeling like I have to stress about that or that if I botch a single puzzle somewhere, I'll have to go back through and find the one thing that would cause a problem for an achievement.

The big change to this, though, is that every puzzle actually has two puzzles. There's a black and white nonogram, the standard sort of thing to expect of any game, but there's also a multicolor nonogram. And there's notable differences between the two, so it's not just replaying the same puzzle (though it's of the same object, so there's some similarities). The multicolor puzzles are a lot of fun, and I like the change of pace with them.

Though on the downside, there's a number of timed levels (they're meant to be battles of some fashion... something something monsters). And I really dislike timed levels where there's an absolute failure option. I particularly don't like them because there's something about the way numbers get greyed out (or well, the equivalent of that) that leads to misclicks that I'd catch on my own, but still get punished for. I believe there was an option so that the game would tell me I'd made a mistake when I make it if I wanted that option turned on... but I don't like the penalization, I'd rather just work through and solve things myself. And as I mention in our Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross discussions, I don't think these puzzles should have their absolute fail states like that. So I could do without those levels.

Back to my not understanding Rune Factory, along the way there's some mechanism for unlocking crops and monsters. And I'm really not sure what the point of this is. It doesn't seem to do anything, and I was expecting something to change over time, or there to be some sense of interactivity. Instead they just sort of..... stand there. It's like having a lot of bells and whistles on something, but the bells and whistles won't actually make noise. The puzzles, and in particular the colour puzzles, are great but there's a lot of extras to this game that don't actually add anything extra.

Recap

There's a whole bunch of nonogram puzzles out there, and more just keep coming, and far from the early Picross games, there's now a lot that are trying to add extra features and so I know I'm just going to keep churning through these as time goes on because they're usually great second screen games.

Piczle Cross Adventure is a solid puzzle game with some fun story elements and a good sense of humour, and I do think it's worth playing. It's available on both Steam and the Nintendo Switch. 

Murder by Numbers has some great elements to it and hooked me with some of the characters and storyline, though there's a couple quality of life issues that ended up having an outsized impact on me. Murder by Numbers is available on both Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum was, by far, the most pleasant surprise of these. The puzzles do get possibly a bit too hard at points, but I really enjoy the pace this game has of puzzles followed by information about the exhibits. I've got a lot to go through with it still, but I've been enjoying it. Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum is available on Steam.

Piczle Cross: Rune Factory is simply not as fun, in terms of story and characters, as Score Studios' other game that I played. Still, the colour nonograms give the game a lot of value even though I don't think there's really anything interesting outside of the puzzles. Sometimes that can be enough. Piczle Cross: Rune Factory is available on Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

For a fan of nonograms, I don't think you can really go wrong with any of these. Piczle Cross Adventure and Murder by Numbers are good for people that would like some story to help keep engaged, Piczle Cross: Rune Factory has a nice change of pace with the colour puzzles, and Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum definitely caters to people that like museums. So there's something for everyone, so long as you like puzzles first.

Game on, everyone.