Valentine's Day Griddlers

fun

A deeply flawed picross game - technologically, visually, and conceptually.

- Game runs at an obnoxious 1024x768. All you can do is upscale it to watery fullscreen with 4:3 letterbox. It hurts my eyes.
- Startup "tips" every time you start a puzzle cannot be disabled. By level 8 the game literally explained to me that "The horizontal lines are called rows". I'm speechless.
- Store page advertises "griddlers with no pen and paper!" like yeah we understand the concept of computers yes?
- Three mistakes = instant game over. Painted a line over the wrong row on accident? That's 3+ mistakes, game over, start the puzzle from scratch. You already have the stars system in place, why force game over?!
- In-game coins, bonus coins mechanics, a shop to buy extra mistake-chances and hints, and generally more crap you never asked for in a game like this.
- Poorly picked font of white characters on a light-gray background in a 1024x768 window (or in blurry fullscreen) makes it seriously hard for the eyes.

I seem to have exhausted Steam's entire supply of Picross games at this point. This is the first title that I'm gonna have to skip because of how badly made it is from every perspective.

Full disclosure: I got this on sale for .49 cents USD for the theme. It was on sale around Valentine's day, so why not, right? Well, I'll admit these are not my favorite type of logic puzzles in the first place, though the tutorial to make sure you understand how to play was fun.

It's the color scheme that isn't. The wee white numbers on the light grey background had me squinting. The font style also had me guessing if I was looking at a 1 or 7. Add in this company's three key system that they won't let you turn off, and it was soon a frustrating slog.

You can try to forgo the keys and grind for coins for power ups, but it just frustrates the heck out of me that this wasn't set up with a casual relaxing play in mind. You either have to restart at every mistake to get your three keys, and good luck realizing you made a mistake with the wee numbers, or grind for coins to buy those power ups for hints and to undo any mistakes.

Not my cup of tea, and nothing I'd recommend to try for your first try at this logic genre.