Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons

This is a ridiculously good value for an exceptionally well made picross game. I got this for $4.99 at the last Steam sale after having enjoyed Piczle Cross Adventures a lot and my play time is 49 hours just to complete all the included puzzles once. Quality of life additions to this game are outstanding, so good that I never want to play another picross game that doesn't have them. For the many large size grid puzzles, the ability to tap Alt to highlight which rows and columns have logical moves available is a game changer. Picross can very easily cross the line from fun to infuriatingly annoying if the designer isn't careful to make sure there are always logical ways to proceed and you're forced to just guess and hope you get lucky, and I'm very impressed that with repeated use of the Alt key feature through scores of puzzles this developer was so careful that there were almost no instances of no logical moves being available, happened no more than 5 times across almost 50 hours of gameplay. Another huge positive QOL addition was a "show mistakes" options that specifically highlighted which squares were marked wrong when you click it. In other picross games without this when I ran into contradictions it was almost always a restart of the puzzle rather than trying to laboriously backtrack to figure out where I went wrong. Before buying this I was a little wary because I had no idea what "Story of Seasons" is. A cartoon? A game? I'm glad to say that playing thru the entirety of the game I still have no idea what "Story of Seasons" is. So nice job by the developer getting whoever the Story of Seasons people are to cut him a check for using their name and some graphics I guess without letting it in any way mess up his game. Only a few minor gripes with the game. The resolution is slightly broken for no apparent reason. I use a 2560x1440 monitor and the game maxes out at 1920x1080, Annoying, but it looked fine, so it wasn't really an issue. The music is pretty brutal. Just terrible, way too upbeat and in your face, and incredibly repetitive in such a long game. I tried just turning it off, but then the game is almost dead silent, which feels weird, so I just set it the music volume at 1/10 and occasionally muted my PC when it got too annoying. If you play the whole game using whatever QOL aids you want to use, you will get every achievement, which is great. It just would have been nice if they came more steadily throughout the game to give you a sense of progress I like from achievements instead of almost all coming way at the end after finishing the last couple dozen puzzles.

If you like Picross puzzles, this one works well enough and as such is enjoyable. The images you're making are meh. The Story of Seasons theming is cute, but isn't particularly good. Still, I'm a big fan of Picross puzzles so have been enjoying playing this. If you're looking for something that game-ifies picross puzzles this isn't it. It's really just a collection of Story of Seasons themed Picross Puzzles with controls that work well.

I have now 100% the game, it was fun doing the puzzle with SOS soundtrack :) I had no issues or lag, if you like SOS and this kind of puzzle it's a no brainer go for it !