Daydream Mosaics 4: Shades of Blue

Gorgeous game as usual from Lucaciu Studio. If you haven't played any of these games before and enjoy seeing some storyline, this series is a serialized story which began with Daydream Mosaics 2 and each new game gives you the next piece of the story. The "chapters" of the story have gotten shorter with the newer games due to the localization hassles, but the scenery and dialog still make me want to keep going to see what's going to happen next. There are 120 nonograms and 9 each of HOS, spot the difference games, and jigsaw puzzle minigames. The minigames unlock as you earn enough stars from playing the nonograms. Be warned that although none of the grids are bigger than 15 x 25, the puzzles this time are considerably harder than in the first 3 games, which were pretty easy and great for nonogram beginners. I'm not a pro at these games and play this series because it's so pretty and I like the story; it took a lot more focus and about twice as long for me to complete this installment compared to the earlier games. All the nonograms will solve logically without powerups or hints, but some puzzles were real nail-biters for me. The typical play modes of relaxed, normal, and advanced seen in many nonogram games is present, where you have a mistake counter and either individual numbers crossing off or nothing crossing off until the row/column is completed; unused spaces will auto-complete when all the colored spaces are filled in. There is also a "freestyle" mode with no mistake counter and no auto-completing of unused spaces which otherwise plays a lot like advanced because numbers don't cross off until you finish a row/column and all the powerups and hints are also disabled. A new "day-dream" feature in the main screen allows you to view your currently completed scenes in a sort of "screensaver" way, so you can have something pretty with swimming fish going on your screen and nice music if you want to chill or have something running in the background while you're doing something else. The only detractor I noticed with this feature is the scenes don't change by themselves - you have to click a button on the bottom of the screen to switch images and if you clicked the "hide UI" button so you can simply view the whole scene, have to click the screen again to get the buttons back before you can switch pictures. I'd have liked it if the background pictures which are displayed behind the nonograms were also incorporated into the "daydream" feature because those are also lovely, even if they aren't animated, and would have been nice to include. Recommended if you enjoy nonograms and want some eye candy to boot!

Great game.