Review: Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons Offers a New Crop of Nonogram Puzzles 

We’ve seen Bokujou Monogatari puzzle games in the past, but Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons marks the first collection of nonogram puzzles based on the series. It feels like it should fit, in a way, given the series did start out with sprite-based entries on systems like the SNES and Game Boy. However while this is fine enough, it doesn’t feel as well executed as the Picross series or similar sorts.  

There’s no story or actual farming to Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons. Rather, you’re going through 350 nonogram puzzles, and five collage puzzles that unlock as you complete the smaller ones, that are inspired by the series. You’ll be presented with an empty grid that features context clues that hint at which spots need to be filled. Once you mark all the correct boxes, the finished image is revealed. (You’ll also get a record of your time.)

The gimmick here, besides getting to see how the simplistic pixels come together to represent an element from the series, is how other farming elements end to being tied into the affair. The icons showing if you used certain hint elements like clue roulette are shaped like the farming tools from the series. As you complete puzzles in the different categories like farm, villagers, animal, or crop, hearts will show up. Time “passes” as you complete puzzles, showing new years and days and a growing farm in the background. There’s also an Almanac with details about different characters and elements from the game that fills as you complete puzzles. Also, music from the games are used as background themes. 

The thing about a nonogram game is how part of the enjoyment comes as you start to perhaps recognize the image as you start to complete a puzzle, and Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons is terrible at that. While some crops or animals ended up being a bit recognizable, most of the times I didn’t recognize what I was discovering. Even when it was finished, I’d have to squint at the finished pictures for some characters to discern who who the heck I was staring at. Part of this I think stems from this pulling from newer entries, as well as some of these people not being recognizable when scaled back to the simplest measures. 

At the very least, many of the quality of life elements you expect from such a game are present. You can turn on a timer. There’s a clue roulette for getting a hint for a row and column. Hints can be enabled for rows. You can have an autocounter enabled. It is also possible to check for mistakes or have rows auto-complete when you’ve marked all the correct boxes. 

However, my biggest complaint comes when you get into the larger puzzles. Anything over 15×15 becomes so difficult to read. There is an option to maximize the puzzle to eliminate the quick tips toolbar at the bottom of the screen, but it isn’t enough to really help. Some sort of zoom function really feels mandatory for anything over 20×20.

The thing about a good nonogram game is when you can actively see the picture come together as you tick the correct boxes. Jupiter is great at this with its various Picross games. While this Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons puzzle game can be an entertaining and challenging diversion, it was rare that I would deduce what I was looking at as I completed each of the nonogram puzzles. This is entertaining enough and includes quality of life features you’d expect, but it isn’t handled as well as something like Picross S Genesis & Master System Edition.

Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons is available for the Nintendo Switch and PC.