Picross Bonbon - Nonogram

Well, I liked this.

"Picross Bonbon - Nonogram" is a basic Nonogram game... for those who never played one, it's a kind of grid-deduction-puzzle game, not unlike Minecraft or Sudoku. You're given a grid and a number of numerical clues. You must deduce where the safe places to click are. In a Nonogram, the correct clicks will reveal a small, obviously low resolution image or pattern. Yay, what fun. This is why top of the line gaming PCs costs thousands of dollars, right?

The developer, Creobit, has copy + pasted this game an insane FOURTY ONE TIMES... why cash in on one asset if you can cash in on multiple copies of the same game? Asset flipping begins at home!

Here's a list of the asset flips of this game that the Russian "developer" is polluting Steam with:

• Asian Riddles 1, 2, 3 + 4
  
• Christmas Griddlers
  
• Christmas Griddlers Journey to Santa
  
• Detective Riddles - Sherlock's Heritage 1 + 2
  
• Easter Riddles
  
• Egypt Picross Pharaohs Riddles
  
• Fill And Cross Christmas Riddles
  
• Fill and Cross Magic Journey
  
• Fill and Cross Pirate Riddles 1, 2 + 3
  
• Fill and Cross Royal Riddles
  
• Fill and Cross Trick or Treat 1, 2 + 3
  
• Fill and Cross World Contest
  
• Griddlers Beach Season
  
• Griddlers Legend Of The Pirates
  
• Griddlers TED and PET 1 + 2
  
• Griddlers Victorian Picnic
  
• Halloween Patchwork Trick or Treat
  
• Halloween Riddles Mysterious Griddlers
  
• Magic Griddlers 1 + 2
  
• Olympus Griddlers
  
• Picross Beach Paradise
  
• Picross Bonbon - Nonogram (this game)
  
• Picross Fairytale - nonogram: Red Riding Hood secret
  
• Picross Fairytale: Legend of the Mermaid
  
• Picross Hansel and Gretel - Nonograms
  
• Riddle of the mask
  
• Royal Riddles
  
• Santa's Toy Factory Nonograms
  
• Thanksgiving Day Griddlers
  
[*] Valentine's Day Griddlers 1 + 2

Damn I can't believe I finally finished this. Officially my 2nd most played game on Steam o.o

Going into this I knew it was a mobile port, so I wasn't expecting *much*, maybe the other reviewers didn't know that, but either way I think "mostly negative" is a tad bit harsh.

Yeah the game is very very basic, it lacks pretty much all the basic things you'd expect from a nonogram:

- Doesn't cross off completed numbers/hints. You don't even get the option to do it yourself.
- No accessibility settings at all, even basic stuff like background colour change/font size etc.
- Like stated above, the font size is TINY on bigger nonograms, for basically no reason as there is 100% space for them to be larger. I often confused 8 with 6 as well as 3 and 5 ALL the time and it of course isn't a good thing to get the numbers wrong.
- In my opinion the "what line you have hovered over" indicator needs to be waaay darker. I struggled to see which line I was on often.
- Puzzle sizes are random (apart from maybe the first few), so sometimes you get thrown a bunch of easy, and then a lot of hards, no matter where you are in progress. If that's your thing then cool, but sometimes you just wanna do one or the other. You can't skip ahead on levels so you can't just go pick another level either.
- It's very easy to mess up and click a square by accident, so you either clear it or turn it into an x/filled. Literally every other nonogram game I've played stops you being able to paint over X's.
- A lot of wording is clearly from the mobile game which they haven't bothered changing for the PC version, like "tap" instead of click.
- Lack of title/description for finished pictures. Sometimes I still had no idea what they were even when they were completed/coloured in.

There's honestly probably a bunch more things I've forgotten. But all I'm really saying is the game is very very basic, but I clearly enjoyed it hence the 130 hours playtime, so rating badly would just be stupid of me. That doesn't mean I can't advise you against playing, because imo there are plenty of better nonogram games on Steam (I just happened to have already played most of them already).

This is why one should always read the reviews before buying. I saw that this was a picross/nonogram game and I purchased it immediately without reading the reviews. Big Mistake. Turns out, this is the worst nonogram game I've ever played on steam, and I have many of them in my collection.

In this game, you can't mark a specific number as done, hence making you count each square again if you're playing the bigger puzzles.

You have to be soooo careful while filling the squares because you can easily unmark them or mark another square.

Dragging a line with lift click or right click will immediately replace a square with different input that you've already filled earlier, like for example, you can't just drag your mouse to mark the rest of the row as X because it will overwrite the squares on the column on its path that you've already marked before! This to me is the deal-breaker as its the most stupid UX design for a nonogram game.

The learning curve is also crazy, you start off with medium and hard puzzles immediately, lolz. I'm ok with that as I'm a seasoned nonogram player but beginners will find this difficult.

Conclusion: I never knew it was possible to rage quit a nonogram game until I played this one.

I'm still playing for some inexplicable reason, but there are much better picross/nonogram games out there.

If you're stuck on a puzzle, there is no way to progress other than to just keep trying or pay more money. This model is common in mobile games but unexpected and frustrating in Steam games.

If you like nonograms/picross, this game is fine.

If you're stuck on a puzzle, there is no way to progress other than to just keep trying or pay for hints. This in-app purchase model is common in mobile games but frustrating in games I already paid for.

not bad

It's a decent game. NOTE - If you are doing this game to 100% it, there are two achievements, one to use 20 hints and one to use 50. I don't like using hints so I just saved it till the end, then spammed it for the achievement on a level I'd already completed. If you do that, you have to complete that level for those hints to count towards your total.

This is a good picross game. Not spectacular but it provides a challenge to go on for hours. It's a bit on the bland side despite all the colours but hey it's a puzzle game, not a work of art. Not much to say really, play it while listening to tv or youtube videos.

Recommendation: Good value for a while, but eventually I stopped enjoying it when the puzzles could no longer be solved with logic alone.

Review: You are exploring the world's desserts, sampling sweets all over the world as you travel across abstracted, goofy versions of several continents. Completing each puzzle reveals a picture of some dessert or dessert-related item: a bonbon, an ice cream cone, a gumball machine, and so forth. As with any freemium game, you can play the entire game for free from beginning to end, or you can buy coins (which are used to travel) or hints for real money. The puzzles quickly get difficult enough that using a hint will be really tempting, but you can use the coins that accumulate for free over time as well. I tried to complete one puzzle a day, and at that rate I never had to pay money, and my ability to use logic to determine which spaces have to be part of the picture and which spaces cannot be part of the picture - the whole point of nonogram puzzles - was sufficient to complete every puzzle...up until a point.

Unfortunately for me, I am simultaneously working my way through two other nonogram puzzle games, and I have played several others in the past. This game suffers in the comparison. There are a bunch of little things done in other nonogram games that in this Picross Bonbon game are either inferior or flat-out missing. Together these little things eventually added up to my realization that I was continuing to play not because I was enjoying the game but because I was reluctant to give up on something I'd started. That coincided with a big step up in difficulty of the puzzles the game was presenting.

But I *did* enjoy this game to begin with; the puzzles on the first continent represent a nice progression in difficulty, without being so complex that the UI issues and missing features scream in your face. I think it's pretty good value at first, and then that diminishes the further you get in the game.

Critique: First of all, I should point out that this game has a user interface seemingly modeled after mobile games. I don't know if it is a port of a mobile game or a game that was simultaneously released across different platforms, but there's a bunch of mobile game features present here. This isn't a huge issue for me, but I know it is a sticking point for some. For example, there's the three-star rating system for each puzzle: complete a puzzle and you are awarded one, two, or three stars. There's also a goofy menu system of nested screens, so if you want to quit the game, you have to bring up the menu, select the map icon, return to the map, then click the "return/go back" arrow, return to the title screen, then click the "X" icon to quit the game...rather than the usual game convention of bringing up the ESC menu and selecting "Quit." Like I said, it's a lot of little things like this that ultimately make the game irritating to play.

But I could overlook those if the gameplay interface was better. For better or worse (I say worse), the puzzle gameplay in Picross Bonbon is the closest to what I imagine playing a nonogram in a book or newspaper would be like: the interface doesn't tell you whether you've put the marks in the correct place, nor does it tell you whether you've completed a row or column correctly. It will tell you that the conditions of the row or column have been met: you have put in 8 - 2 - 5 - 1 in that column...but you could have put them in randomly, and they could be completely incorrect.

However, the biggest, most egregious foul in the nonogram gameplay to my mind is that you will eventually reach puzzles where you have to GUESS (or use a hint). One should absolutely never, EVER have to guess when solving a logic puzzle. When you work on solving a logic puzzle, you need to KNOW that if you are guessing in that logic puzzle, you're missing something. But in this game, you WILL get to the point where you have to make a blind choice between two or three possible locations for a mark, and then you have to play through a bunch more of the puzzle before you discover whether you guessed correctly. Of course, you can consider that your guess might be a bit more "educated" if you consider the picture that is being formed and choose something that fits better with the image. Your mileage may vary, but this is just terrible to me.

I suspect that the game designers want to present you with situations where you can't know what the right choice is, or reason out the correct choice, so that you will spend currency on hints that will reveal the truth to you without ever showing you WHY you mark one space and not another. That idea - that you would make a logic puzzle that cannot be solved by logic - is so filthy to me I had a hard time getting my fingers to type it through my disgust.

I couldn't believe it at first, but then the situation where I had to guess started recurring more and more often. It's not a fluke. It's a very broken feature of the game. I hate giving up on a game without finishing it, but here I could not finish it without guessing or using "hints" to solve it for me. So I'm going to have to give up on this one.

Real life money for such a small casual Game??????
How greedy are you?????

This game is broken. I would suggest one of 8floor's many other picross/nonogram games.

Microtransactions to use features.

Not a fan...

This will keep you busy for a while.

I wanted to love this game. It was about sweets and had a corgi. Unfortunately it is missing most of the features added in recent nonogram games to make the life of the player easier.

First, this is clearly a mobile port, complete with microtransactions to unlock levels sooner if you clear the beginner things too fast. It also had a store to pay for various currency bundles, but I did not play long enough to figure out what those are for.

Lines don't auto-fill, fine takes me back to how I first started. Numbers don't cross out on the edges when I have them...ok harder to keep track for my eyes but I can deal. No indication when you make a mistake in a row/column, well ok at least I can figure it later with no penalty. The game does give you cute little sugar cubes when a line is completed accurately, BUT the port does not scale well once grids start getting longer and on some puzzles you cannot see the cube on the bottom of columns.

Oh and as others have stated, when you highlight over a filled cell with the opposite icon it OVERWRITES the current item. So even if you know you have a row/column complete you better not drag over your solution. I have never played a game that let you overwrite the current symbol while dragging.

Micro-transaction filled mobile game.