Puppy Cross Review (EndarkCuli)
I absolutely love Picross games, but there are good and bad ways to present them, and this game is a mixed breed in that regard.
The pet theme is adorable, and having the pictures you complete unlock new dog breeds and toys for a playpen is a fantastic incentive to keep playing, even if there's not much interaction outside of rearranging items and petting the good boys and girls. The user interface is certainly functional, and it's nice to be able to fill in multiple boxes in a line, even if once or twice my finger slipped and I was penalised for colouring a spot I wasn't supposed to. However, the puzzle presentation itself is rather bland, and progress is far too linear; instead of letting you pick and choose what to complete like some other Picross games, you're stuck with one new challenge at a time, and frequently going from a 20x20 grid at the end of one "world" to a 5x5 at the start of the next makes for an abnormal difficulty curve. There's an unlockable mode that generates random puzzles at whatever grid size you want, presented as giving a Dalmatian its spots, but random splotches are less appealing than creating an image and sometimes you end up with confusing clues with more than one acceptable answer. Plus, to get all of the achievements, you need to do over a hundred of these random grids with no extra dogs or toys as bonus rewards from it, though at least there's no penalty for having them all be 5x5 solvable in less than a minute...oh, as well as there being achievements for having specific sets of dogs and toys in one section of the pen at the same time, most of which I couldn't have possibly figured out on my own.
Overall, I'd say this was still a novel experience and would recommend it, as long as you don't mind it being "ruff" around the edges.