I do not say this lightly, and I'm sorry to say it, but I have never hated a game so fast. This game is so riddled with bugs that it's a chore (possibly just slightly better than impossible?) to play. Here are my main notes.
[h3]The Good[/h3]
[*]The pictures are cute
[*]The music is nice and I can imagine it doesn't get annoying very fast if you're doing pro mode and taking a while to place each piece
[h3]The Bad[/h3]
[*][b]Most important first:[/b] this game completely misses a MASSIVE part of doing a puzzle: being able to connect pieces to each other. This issue alone makes this game almost unplayable, and I'm only on the second difficulty so far. I cannot IMAGINE how this will impact pro difficulty. You can only snap pieces to their place on the board; they will NOT connect to each other. This is the exact opposite of how real puzzles work...
[*]There is regularly an issue with picking up pieces. A piece will have 70% of its surface area unclickable and you have to find where it will let you pick it up. I assume this has something to do with overlapping with other pieces improperly, but the unclickable parts don't clearly line up with pieces underneath it, so I'm not positive
[*]The pieces, right off the bat, had a visual glitch. The first puzzle, on kid mode (I've yet to play enough to see if this is mode related or random) had a single line of pixels floating a short distance above each piece, leaving the piece field littered with lines that looked terrible and interrupted the good vibes of the game
[*]The music quickly becomes repetitive and almost monotonous if you place pieces with some regularity, because each piece placement adds a note to the song in the background. Cute concept, could be slightly better executed.
[*]For some ungodly reason, each puzzle starts with every piece in place and you have to manually click the spread out button. Or, if you enjoy getting all of the achievements without suffering through the whole game, you can just go through and click each piece once and it will snap immediately into place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[*]The holes and arms on each piece are all cut exactly the same with no variation. Not only that, the placement of the arms is extremely regular/predictable. On the current pro puzzle I'm doing, the entire bottom row goes back and forth, 3/3 arms, 0/3 arms. In fact, now that I'm looking closer, it looks like every other row is like this and the other half are an alternation of vertical arms/horizontal arms... Yikes.
[*]The pieces snap to the board from way too far away, leading to tons of instances of setting a piece down and accidentally having it snap in place half a space below, which, combined with the inability to snap pieces to each other, leads to the most annoying combination of too difficult/too easy you could get out of a puzzle game, making the gameplay feel senseless and pointless.
[*]Perhaps paired with the line glitch mentioned above, another visual jankiness is that you can see through the spaces between pieces. If you have a solid background selected, like black, you will see black spaces between many rows/columns where others don't have them, making the picture feel torn apart awkwardly.
[*]While the pictures are nice, they're digitally drawn in a coloristically minimalist style, which, unfortunately, pairs very badly with all of the bugs and jank listed, because there's very little way to differentiate two pieces of almost the same exact color aside from just trying it in every single possible spot until you find the right one. Excellent gradient color vision is a plus, because any help the gradient in color would be is very subtle.
[*]There is an achievement for every puzzle on every difficulty. So, it doesn't matter if you do them all in pro, you can't 100% the game unless you go through and do each picture 5 times. Literally, why. Please, for the love of god, set the achievements so that completing on any difficulty will check off the achievements for all difficulties below it.
I'm very sorry that this game wasn't as good as I expected as I had high hopes. If anyone reading this is searching for a good puzzle game, I have put in over 300 hours on Super Jigsaw Puzzle Generations, which is free and adds a new free puzzle with each DLC they put out, which are many and often. I highly recommend it.
