Pixel Puzzles 2: Anime Review (IFIYGD)
The worst of the Pixel Puzzle franchise.
That's saying a lot.
The art is mid.
The animated background with swirling puzzle pieces floating on it and often disappearing off screen or behind the puzzle is beyond annoying.
The color change options for the puzzle tray itself are limited and usually do not help much to make trying to fit pieces together much easier, but you do have that option.
The annoying af fairy who throws pixel dust is, well... annoying af. You can remove her by hitting the key after loading a puzzle, but without her there, you get no pixel dust to "earn" hints. And hints may be your only sanity-saving grace for some of the puzzles. So you keep her and turn the audio down to 0 so you don;t have to listen to her cringy and repetitive lines and nails-on-chalkboard voice. She will sit in place and prevent you from picking up pieces that go behind her, though- so be ready for that.
On larger puzzles (higher piece count) the pieces are so small that you can't see what's on them, as they float in the animated background- you do have a zoom feature, which helps some, and you can open up a tray to store pieces in. But most of the time, you won;t know what is actually on a piece until you place it on the puzzle tray itself and it blows up to actual size.
No image comparison during play, unless you use the Ghost hint feature, which fades out way too quickly IMHO. And it takes a bit of time to collect enough pixel dust from the annoying af fairy, it uses a good amount of dust in the tube, and IMHO, the Location hint is far more helpful and useful.
No Cloud Saves- so if you switch computers or your computer dies and you don't have the save file stored on a thumb drive to transfer to your new computer- you get to experience the joy of starting all over again, (Big Hint- make manual backups of your save file...)
All that said- I paid like 64ยข USD when I bought this back in like 2016, and I still feel like I paid too much. But at least the dev didn't start adding new puzzle packs and achievements every 2-4 weeks like with some of their other games. So you can get all achievements with only one purchase. Buy it on a deep discount if you really enjoy jigsaw puzzles *and* being miserable while doing them.
(Quick edit to add spacing between points for easier reading.)