Piczle Cross: Rune Factory

As a hardcore Rune Factory fan who likes to do nonograms, I love so much about this! This game features background music and a small encyclopedia that features at least 3 different entries of the series and honestly it gave me a blast! Beside that you can decorate your background using different assets from Rune Factory 5 after you've unlocked them with the related puzzle, which feels pretty minor though. The key feature of this game is solving different nonogram levels in two different modes (basic and color) and it does it's job okay-ish. The game is not well programmed. For a nonogram game it's buggy and overall badly optimized. Especially the hints are an absolute mess! For example in riddle RFN022 only 3/6 hints you get in the beginning are actually helping you. What am I supposed to do with the hints 1, 2 and 3 in a row or column of 14 fields? None of the fields can be filled in or crossed out with certainity. It's something that really bothers/kind of frustrates me as I'll sometimes quadracheck the marked row/column and feel lowkey dumb since I don't see what the hint wants to tell me. I also can't recommend trying to play it via touchscreen in handheld mode! It's playable in handheld mode of your Steamdeck or Nintendo Switch system but it's such a pain to fill out with the touchscreen and button controls feel really slow. Touchscreen however feels unintuitive and cumbersome. For example when you marked fields as correct already and then want to cross out the rest of the row, it will overwrite the correct ones. It would have been a great addition in my eyes for long travels by train or cozy afternoons on the sofa. I played lots of picross games on Nintendo 3DS before where touchscreen controls worked great and without effort even though the controls differed depending on the game. On top of the bugs it's quite laggy on Nintendo Switch at least. I have a really solid gaming tower so I don't know how it performs on low end systems. After all the criticism I want to acknowledge a great feature I don't know from other digital nonogram games which is the count/measure option. That way you're less likely to miscount. It's a pleasant addition for lazy days! And if you feel like using no hints at all and have no trouble using mouse or button controls, the game is still very enjoyable. Then again, since the hints will cause a lot of confusion instead of actually helping you getting a grasp out of nonogram logic, I can't recommend this game for beginners. However, if you are a big fan of the Rune Factory series like me and like to do riddles, I'm certain it will bring a smile to your face! It has lots of puzzles so when you just look at the amount of content, I'd say it was worth it's money (maybe buy it on sale). But if you're looking for a nonogram game just for the sake of puzzle solving, I probably wouldn't buy it because of the many bugs and clunky controls. I'd rather recommend Nintendo's picross series in that case.