Picross Logiart Grimoire (review)
The Summer of Demos : Day Thirty-One
Picross is more than a long-running puzzle series - it's a way of life. When I see a game with a nonogram mode or mechanic like Master Key or Murder By Numbers, I always give it a shot. When I saw that series developer Jupiter were making their own nonogram game outside of Nintendo's Picross branding, I made sure to check it out.
If you're unfamiliar, Picross is a puzzle composed of a grid with numbers lined around it. By process of elimination, you fill in the boxes in line with the numbers on each row and column. If a row in a 10x10 grid says “6 3”, then you need to fill in six squares and then three squares with a space of at least one square in between. They start simple but escalate to 30x60 grids by the end of each entry. The problem is that going from the hardest puzzles in one game to the 2x2 tutorial grids in the next game and building up to the hard ones all over again is a choppy experience.
Fortunately, Logiart Grimoire (with Picross in front of the name on Switch) has a more non-linear approach to progression. Thanks to the light plot conceit of restoring the pages of a magical tome with your Black Mage-esque sidekick Emil, you jump from category to category solving puzzles
With each puzzle solved you have a new Logiart you can fuse with others to create new ones to solve. You can't just combine them at random; each puzzle has a sentence describing what it is. Words highlighted in blue are hints about which Logiart you can fuse and words highlighted in red are hints for Logiarts you haven't unlocked yet. Fusing incorrect Logiarts will unlock one of Emil’s failed attempts to solve, with one available in the demo in addition to 49 regular Logiarts.
Outside of the main 280 Logiarts (and Emil’s 24), there are hundreds of bonus puzzles designed by the game's crowdfunding backers, as well as plenty of bonus puzzles straight from the developer.
As with the Picross S series, there are plenty of accessibility options and hint features in the settings to make your puzzling experience perfect for you. I personally keep the Hint Roulette that fills in a random row and column off, as well as Autocorrect. So many older Picross games punish you with time two minute time penalty if you make a mistake in exchange for correcting it, so I appreciate being able to toggle it. Also worth mentioning are the touch controls that can be enabled for handheld mode either all the time or togglable so they switch when you touch the screen or buttons.
I make no illusions of my love for the nonogram, especially the Picross series. The main negative against this release is that Emil chimes in with his thoughts on what you've solved a little too verbosely, but his two cents are fairly infrequent. That aside, this is a wonderful release and hopefully one of many multi platform Jupiter releases to come.
In a word : PICROSS!
Picross Logiart Grimoire is a nonogram puzzle game developed and published by Jupiter Corporation for the Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam (without the Picross name). All images used copyright of Jupiter unless otherwise stated.
Thanks for reading! This is the last instalment of The Summer of Demos, but also as full a review of a Picross game as you can give. I played so many great and…not-so-great demo for this project so forgive me for being self-indulgent with this one. Unfortunate that I got locked out of Substack right at the end there, but look forward to a Master Post with links to every article in alphabetical order soon.
Special thanks to Rist and Zlembke for chipping in on Patreon during this month. If you're interested in other people's thoughts on demos, I've linked to a recent think piece from Aftermath below.