Khimera: Puzzle Island Reviews

Good game

I had a lot of fun with this game. The music, art, and story are all very charming.

A great puzzle game to dip in and out of when I need a fix. The characters are full of personality, which is a hallmark of Suits and Sandals games. A lot of fun dialogue and scenes. This is a very customisable Picross game, which is a pleasant surprise. All the icons can be changed and new options can be bought as you progress through the game. The puzzles themselves are so far not particularly challenging, but if you enjoy Picross there's a lot to keep you occupied. I love when a puzzle game is elevated by the presentation, and this is one of best examples of it. If you love Picross you will love this.

A super charming and super fun nonogram (we all know the other word) puzzle game. I really liked the little story there was and would love to see more of the characters. The music is also really great.

Pretty good picross-like, cute story mode. It's a bit on the easier side in general. Still, if you're looking for that kind of puzzle, it's not the worst you can do. Also, small detail but annoying, when alt-tabbed, it doesn't show in the task bar, somehow.

It's Picross, just like it says on the tin. Twenty-nine hours worth of nonograms (and some cute, funny excuse plot)? Yeh, I'd say I got a buck-fifty worth of enjoyment outta that. You don't have to play the first Khimera before this, but it's free so I don't know why you wouldn't. A decent number of the puzzle solutions are callbacks to earlier works the dev has done so you might as well. One qualifier I will add, though, is that the puzzle sizes cap out at 20x15. So if you're in search of those 30x30 monsters you may find this too easy.

"You know what should be the follow-up to this platformer game? mario's Picross" And then there was picross. Since the original game is free, buying this is the only way to support the development of actual Khimera II. But this is so super niche... Luckily, I like Picross. It's a bit hard to recommend this to Picross newcomers because the (non-replayable?) tutorial is probably too much infodump for a first-timer: it took me a good 20 puzzles or so to figure out how to use the notes feature which is on middle-click. Additionally, unlike mario, the game doesn't tell you when you made a mistake: there's an item that highlights mistakes but it's temporary and removes your no-items medal. So, this is a game for like Picross experts after a game that is basically shovel knight with a dash. Said experts may be a bit confused looking at the main menu and seeing 18 puzzles per world; the bulk of them are the "mosaic" puzzles which are 48 smaller puzzles each. With all this in mind, Khimera is actually a VERYGOOD picross game, with plot somehow, and music that sounds like Sonic eloped with Ape Escape. You can customize your tiles to have ur head, and make all the X's say NO and make your notes be an onigiri. The game gives you medals based on time even though the way to get good times is remember the layout and solve it in 12 seconds. When you're... inputting, tiles of a different type won't be changed and you're locked to the row or column (This doesn't SOUND important but it is trust me bro) Picross nuts will love it. Non-Picross fans may be forced to buy the nurse DLC in khimera 1 instead

Fun and fairly challenging nonogram/picross game! A lot of the puzzles didn't look like much of anything to me, so it felt a lot more nonogram than picross, but that's actually a point in the game's favor as someone who prefers to solve puzzles with logic. The story was cutesy and felt like nice breaks between puzzles, and never dragged things out too long. My one criticism is that the game can give the player too much information at times. If there's a row/column with multiple units of the same length, and you find one and X out the squares to either side of it, the game indicates which of those sections you found even if you shouldn't be able to determine that yet. That could be useful if someone is still getting the hang of nonograms, though.