Pixel Puzzles: Japan Reviews

Most beautiful relaxing puzzle game I have found. It has alot going for it. Pluses-Nice music. Floating puzzle pieces that you have to catch. Nice pictures of Japan that you have to build. Cons-No save. You cannot save your puzzle so you have to build it all at once. It can take a really long time. Such an easy feature that is missing it seems.

Didn't like this game. The puzzle pieces don't connect to eachother like in the ancient jigsaw puzzle games that worked on Windows95. Instead, a piece get stuck into place if you put them on the correct spot. Kinda kills the experience, it's not really jigsaw puzzling this way. Hell, even jigsaw puzzle games in windows 3.11 and DOS were able to get that part right.

[h1][b]Pixel Puzzles: Japan * 7/10[/b][/h1] [i]Disclaimer: I obtained this game in a free public mass giveaway.[/i] Pixel Puzzles: Japan is one of the Pixel Puzzles Collection and, as the title suggests, it's a Japan themed variant. [h1][i]INTRO/GAMEPLAY. What is Pixel Puzzles: Japan about? How does it work?[/i][/h1] Actually there's not much to say as the gameplay obviously consists in a puzzle to complete, so you have your central field where you can place the spare pieces floating on the upper and left side. Puzzles are divided in 5 difficulty levels with a decreasing number of puzzles each. Difficulty lies in the number of tiles and their dimension as well because the higher difficulty level brings smaller tiles. Besides, each puzzle set has tiles with their own shapes and harder difficulties bring more odd and irregular shapes. A small advise: play this game on the biggest screen you have. [h1][i]GRAPHIC. Engine And Artistic aspects.[/i][/h1] The entire game is animated in 2d so I can't scream "miracle", yet it doesn't look bad anyways, and despite the game's title it doesn't look that pixellous. [h1][i]SOUNDTRACK. Themes and Accompaniments.[/i][/h1] The soundtrack in the game consists of simple sporadic strumming of the Koto (a japanese typical instruments) with the water cane snapping from time to time, so it's mostly an atmosphere sound. I personally like it but some friend of mine just find it irritating for no reason at all... Bah... [h1][i]LAST NOTES. What doesn't work?[/i][/h1] Once again I've noticed the difficulty in catching the floating tiles with your cursor because the cursor itself seems to be programmed to pick up anything but the highest and closest tile you're pointing. I don't understand it but this will cost you lots of time just to catch the desired tile. The same problem is present in the undeadZ variant of the Pixel puzzle collection, and now I'm kind of expecting to find it in other releases as well... Oh And just like in the UndeadZ version this glitch/feature magically diasppear as you're trying to complete the final biggest puzzle. [h1][i]TL;DR. Pros And Cons[/i][/h1] [h1]+++PROs+++[/h1][list] [*][b] PUZZLE.[/b] A simple and relaxing puzzle game. That's it. [*][b] MUSIC.[/b] There isn't a real soundtrack playing continuously but there will be random strummings of Koto (A Japanese instrument) to keep the Japanese mood. [/list] [h1]---CONs---[/h1][list] [*][b] CURSOR.[/b] For some odd reason the cursor seems intentionally glitchy as you will struggle to pick up the tile you're aiming while you will attract any other tile nearby. Pretty annoying. [*][b] DIMENSIONS.[/b] You should play this game on the biggest screen you have because on higher difficulties tiles will get really small. [*][b] SAVE GAME.[/b] There's no way to save the game, meaning you have to complete the puzzle you're working on or you will lose the progress on that puzzle. This is definitely odd as it might result a useless feature to use with the first puzzle but becomes very useful in the latest ones that might take long time to complete (almost two hours for the final one) [/list] [i]I played this game on this machine: Laptop Lenovo Z50 Intel Core i5-4210U 8Gb RAM DDR3 GeForce 840M/Intel HD Graphics 4400 Windows 10 Home x64[/i] [quote] You can follow my reviews through my curator page: [url=store.steampowered.com/curator/28510673]Everybody's reviews[/url] You can also join my Steam group: [url=steamcommunity.com/groups/EverybodysReviews]Everybody's reviews[/url] You are welcome to join and post your own reviews, we can support each other![/quote]

This is one of the best of the Pixel Puzzle series. Being the first one I acquired, the music is nice, the koi pond an interesting concept, and the art of the puzzles great. While the puzzles do become increasingly more difficult as you progress in the tiers, it is still a beautiful game. Buying this game automatically unlocks the puzzles from it in the Ultimate edition. Also, buying any of the volumes gives you the Ultimate game automatically (that's how I ended up with it). Note: If the water drip thing is annoying you, just grab a fish from the pond and stick it in the spigot. Seriously... that actually counts as two achievements, one for grabbing a fish, and the second for sticking it in the pipe...

If you like jigsaw puzzles this is a good game to try. The music is soothing and the puzzles make lovely pictures. There are 26 achievements that are fun to get. It took me almost 20 hours to get them all. There are three drawbacks. First there is no save feature. So you have to complete each puzzle before leaving the game or start over. Some of the harder puzzles took me a couple hours or so to complete so this was quite annoying. Second the piece size decreases since they cannot increase the puzzle size. If you have a small computer screen or poor eyesight this may make things difficult. Third a few of the puzzles make it hard to pick up the piece you want you have to grab other pieces and move them away from the piece you want in order to grab it. Even with these drawbacks it is an enjoyable experience and I am glad to have purchased the game. However waiting for a sale might be a good idea.

After fully completing the game (9 hours for one playthrough), I'm finally reviewing it, and I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys jigsaw puzzles. I LOVE jigsaws, but find myself unable to partake in many because I have so few flat surfaces around my home, and I also have quite a few cats that are always determined to chew and eat the pieces. Pixel Puzzles allows the player to piece together jigsaws without the hassle. There are a few pros and cons to the game when compared to regular jigsaws that I thought I'd point out. For one, the puzzles are extraordinarily easy for those of us who are used to piecing together 500 or 1000 piece + jigsaw puzzles. Why? The top tier puzzle is, I believe, only 300 pieces, for one thing. Another thing is that the pieces are always rightside up; that is, you never have to turn pieces around clockwise or counter-clockwise to try different sides in different places. When you place a piece in its respective spot, it "clicks" into place, which can be seen as a pro and a con. For one thing, that's convenient, but for another, sometimes I would place a piece in about the area I thought it would go, and it would snap into place, taking away the challenge of guesswork, trial and error. There were also a few times I'd grab pieces that were unique to save them for later, only for them to snap into place simply because I'd placed them on the board in just the right place, when I'd had no intention on placing it yet. Many reviews state the lack of a save feature as a flaw, but I had no trouble with this. I'd sit down for an hour and knock a few of them out. I 100% the game without knowing whether or not there was a save feature, since I never needed it. The puzzles have so few pieces even in the top tiers that 45 minutes to an hour is the most you will likely need to set aside. The one flaw that actually DID bother me that others have mentioned is the piece selection. Unused pieces float around the borders of the puzzle area in a pool of water, and they can overlap while floating. If you see a piece you want, it can take a few tries to pick the right one, and this can, admittedly, be infuriating. I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and one of my "obsessions" is that I have to complete the border of a jigsaw puzzle before placing any middle pieces. This one flaw had me reeling quite a few times, because I'd have my eye on a border piece and kept trying incessantly to pick it up, only to pick up dozens of middle pieces in the process. This was pretty time consuming, since I couldn't progress in the puzzle personally until I had the border complete, and this sometimes would take picking up half of the entire puzzle's pieces and setting them aside to accomplish. The last issue with the game is that I couldn't find a way to view what the completed puzzle would look like once I was putting it together. So in the midst of a puzzle, the player can't pick up a piece and check the "box", if you will, to guess just about where it will go. In the end, while this is technically an issue, I didn't mind it. It presented a challenge in the game that I enjoyed taking on due to the fact that the game is easier than regular jigsaws. All in all, if you like jigsaws, you will probably enjoy this, and I highly recommend it for those of you who find it hard to make the room for physical jigsaws, as this is the next best thing. While the game is fairly short, I thought it was a great deal as I got it on sale and I ended up paying less than $1.00 per hour of playtime, which is a great value. I highly encourage the developers to consider more pixel puzzle games with other varieties of subject matters, as I'll definitely be supporting future releases.

I like this game but its so limited with only like 12 puzzles. It needs more puzzles or a way to use your pictures to create your own puzzles. I have had no issues with this at all. Great work more scope for this to be improved to make it even better for me. Needs DLC'S AND A PUZZLE CREATURE I think this would make it future alot better for people to buy it.

Pixel Puzzles Japan is a puzzle game where you have to complete 21 different puzzles. The game starts easy with a low number of pieces and gradually becomes more difficult with more pieces for each new puzzle. Puzzling as such is fun and well done. However, what's extremely annoying is the fact that the puzzles pieces are flowing in water and are constantly moving. Since sometimes five pieces are flowing over each other at the same position, it's almost impossible to grab the piece you need. You see it, you want it, you grab it but you end up with a different piece. This happens all the time and it sucks. Unfortunately the game does not have an option to keep the pieces from moving. It would not be possible to implement this anyway, because the most difficult puzzles have so many pieces that the developers would not be able to display all of them at the same time on the screen because the space is insufficient. I assume that's why they decided to make the pieces flow in water. Pros: - puzzling in general is fun Cons: - extremely annoying because you keep missing the pieces you want - terrible Japanese music (drives you nuts) - turning off the music is not permanent. The next time you start the game it's back. - you can't take screenshots. For some reason F12 does not work.

So why do I not recommend this game yet still love the game???? Well the answer is quite puzzling... Let me begin by saying that if you enjoy a good jigsaw puzzle you will find great enjoyment within this game. There is a definite feel of working a jigsaw puzzle here and it's quite relaxing and enjoyable. The pictures are decent and give some good challenge in matching up the pieces and once you get to the larger piece puzzles it really feels like your working a real jigsaw puzzle on a table top. Another interesting slant on this game is that in many puzzles the pieces are cut in ways you could never cut a real life puzzle. This is good in the sense that it opens up new challenges with matching up pieces and actually adds to the puzzle experience in ways that only a virtual puzzle could. It's bad in a way too though because some of these cut styles up the difficulty in matching pieces by cut to sky high levels that make it nearly impossible to do, leaving you to rely on color matching alone. If you’re looking for more challenge though this is certainly a way to get it in ways that physical puzzles could never match so I think this is certainly a positive overall. So where does it all go so wrong?? It's a couple of things that on the lower end, smaller piece puzzles, you won't experience too badly but as you climb up to the high piece puzzles will have you ripping your hair out. The first and most obvious fault is that there is NO mid puzzle save feature. On the small piece puzzles this isn't so much an issue as you can solve them in 15-20 minutes tops. However as you approach the larger piece puzzles this becomes an issue as most people don't have all morning or night to finish a puzzle. Your only option is to leave the game running in the background of your computer, which isn't a horrible option, but sucks down your computers resources if you'd like to go play another game for a while or sucks down electricity if you'd rather just power down your computer for the night.... And there's really no excuse for why the developers couldn't have coded a simple mid-puzzle save feature for this. The second flaw is in piece selection. The pieces float around in a "river" around the puzzle which honestly works as it allows you to see the pieces and really resembles the pieces in a box being shaken around a bit only probably better as all the pieces are right side up. Another area where virtual is somewhat better than real life. The problem occurs when you see a piece floating out there amongst all the other pieces that you know fits somewhere and you go to grab it, it's as if the program actually goes out of its way to give you every piece except the one you want.... You'll be clicking and clicking though a million pieces just to get the one you want that you can see right in front of you. Several times per puzzle I've clicked on the piece I wanted while it was clearly in the open, with my curser only touching that piece, and been given a different piece. Then when I release that unwanted piece back into the river the piece I wanted disappears from its current location and reappears somewhere else, usually in a mess of many other pieces again..... Super frustrating. At the end of the day, because of those flaws I cannot in all fairness give this game a recommendation. These are flaws that could have, and should have been addressed by the developer before or soon after the game was released. Is there a market for virtual jigsaw puzzle games?? I think the answer is yes. Ways to improve upon the design?? First off mid-puzzle saving is a must. Second off improve the puzzle selection process and perhaps give us two to four "ponds" to place specific pieces in where they will float around separated from the river. Lastly, maybe allow for players to use their own pictures to create their own original puzzles. Maybe even have a Steam Workshop for those puzzles..... I certainly think there's a market for jigsaw puzzle games but this one has too many frustrating flaws to really grow that market...

Fairly decent Jigsaw game but for the love of all that is good and just in this world give the option to turn of the sound of that water bamboo tippy thing. ITS SO ANNOYING. For an otherwise quite relaxing game that sound makes me wince every 10 seconds . **Update** The above is no longer an issue! Very impressed that the developers actually listened to my wee moan. A rare thing indeed in todays gaming industry. I heartily recommend this game , very relaxing and a good way to unwind. Many thanks indeed Decayinglogic! I'll be sure to follow your future projects.