Thats Life of Ralph Reviews

Wow, just wow. If you create a jigsaw game with "how can we make it as unpleasant as possible to play?" as your goal, this might be the result. The only thing they forgot to add was a 2000 pieces version of each picture. I have played through a bunch of jigsaw games here on Steam and in browser (Ravensburger, the jigsaw company, has a great, free jigsaw game with a bazillion images and options on their website). Some of them were pretty badly made. One of them doesn't even have a menu system; you pick the jigsaw to play through a steam launcher menu instead. This is the first jigsaw game that actively gets in the way of solving the puzzles. So much so that I refused to continue playing after half an hour. Pick up a piece and move it to roughly where you think it should go. Unless you do so in slow motion, the piece will tilt strongly and you have to wait several seconds for it to untilt enough for you to determine if it is a good fit where you are currently holding it. This seriously gets in the way of solving the puzzles. But wait, this is a PC jigsaw game, right? Just drop the piece and see if it sticks, right? Right? Wrong. The sticking mechanic requires the piece to be in place almost perfectly. And with your tilted piece attached to the mouse pointer you cannot really tell where the center is. So this doesn't work. Well, dropping it does untilt the piece, so that's a plus. You can then pick it back up and move it a few pixels to where it should go and it will finally stick. But wait! There is more! Can't leave the customer satisfied by accident after all. We at Opala Project (disclaimer, not 'we' but 'they', as I am certainly not affiliated with them in any way, shape or form, but you get the idea) have just the solution! Lets fade out correctly placed pieces so much that you cannot tell if the colors match when you hold another piece next to them. THAT should finally get people to stop wanting to play jigsaw games, right? Huh? still not enough??? Okay then, lets put a pattern over placed pieces to make things even harder. There, that should do it ... It certainly did do it for me. You win, Opala Project. I give up. Not even the Grinch could have sucked the fun out of jigsaw gaming this thoroughly. On a side note, the existing reviews look suspiciously similar and generic. Just saying.

Cute little puzzle game. Overall the music, ui, general 'experience' filling in the jigsaw puzzles, and the short stories of this character/person's life was kind of sweet. I liked that there were 3 different "difficulty" settings, for each of the levels. The small puzzles can be completed pretty easily but the larger ones do take a good bit more time. The artwork is great, very charming and cute. I liked the little furry creatures, and the soft vibey music, and sound settings. The UI itself was quite nice too. Small and compact, but they make sense. Overall I'd recommend this if you just want a simple jigsaw puzzle. No thrills, nothing spooky or unexpected. My only two criticisms are as follows: 1) I wish there was a 'sort pieces by color group' option. This would help speed up the puzzling, rather than having to manually separate and sort them all by clicking. 2) I wish there was a 'click and hold piece' option, instead of having to hold the mouse button to keep holding a puzzle piece. Quite literally everything else I loved, and it was a great, relaxing experience for me. Good job, devs! ~ There was also a minor bug: on puzzle 4 (for me at least, on max puzzle pieces, the story didn't show up on completion, instead some kind of with a script not found error? Not sure why, didn't think to screenshot it either. It didn't crash or anything, but something of note, in case it's a common issue. I'll definitely grab another puzzle game from this dev, if they have more. :)