Piczle Cross: Rune Factory Steam Charts & Stats

I am absolutely the target audience for this game

i like it :) it is a bit jank and i think couldve had more varied stuff to customise and maybe have more than one town map for picrosses X_X i give 8.5/10 bye bye

"This is just going to be like Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons, but Rune Factory themed," I had thought to myself. "Plus it's only content from Rune Factory 3 to 5. How much could there possibly be in this game?" Turns out, there could possibly be a lot! While the previous Piczle Cross had 270 regular puzzles and 5 huge collage puzzles, this one has 300 regular puzzles and 20 medium-to-huge collage puzzles...or rather, 600 and 40, because of the Color Picross mode that adds a new spin to every challenge (sometimes to my frustration, due to muscle memory and sometimes forgetting to switch to the right colour when marking a space). A returning feature is a farm that's really just an idle background image, but while Piczle Seasons just had four automatically cycling seasonal versions that grew depending on puzzles cleared, this one is fully customizable, with puzzles unlocking different farmlands on the backs of giant beasts, various crops and monster helpers, weaponry for your chosen Rune Factory 5 protagonist to wear, and even your choice between the Rune Factory 5 love interests (alas, no 3D models of the 3 and 4 cast, though they do get more special images in the in-game Compendium). Additionally, there's a lot more variation in background imagery during puzzles, such as a kitchen for ingredient puzzles, a sakura blossom tree for people, a pond for fishing, and multiple battlegrounds for fighting against monsters (in which doing well has your protagonist using their equipped weapon against a 3D model of the monster, and missing has the monster attack instead). Honestly, my only negative point when it comes to visuals is that, to my knowledge, there's no way to swap between Ares and Alice after making your initial protagonist choice. Another complaint I had with Piczle Seasons, which was addressed in Piczle Rune, is the progression curve. Both games have plenty of accessibility features, but in Seasons, puzzles weren't really organized by difficulty, aside from the easier 5x5 and 10x10 grids towards the front of a list and most of the harder 20x20 grids towards the back. In comparison, Piczle Rune has two modes: freeplay, and Adventure. Freeplay gives you access to all puzzles immediately, and is better at organizing by difficulty than the Seasons puzzles, while Adventure instead mostly organizes by game and locks off later puzzles until you beat the earlier ones (at least it feels that way; I didn't see my first RF5 love interest until about halfway through), as well as set up the collage puzzles as true challenges to overcome that forces them to play with most hints off and under a (very forgiving hour-per-segment-long) time limit. The player can swap from Adventure to freeplay, but they cannot swap from freeplay to Adventure. Thankfully, though, no achievements or unlockables require a full Adventure run to obtain. As I stated for Piczle Seasons, if you're just looking for a Picross game without the bells and whistles, there are other games on Steam that are more affordable, can be played with cheaper graphics cards, and add additional substance like a compelling storyline. But these are some REALLY GOOD bells and whistles, especially if you're a fan of Rune Factory's visuals, though you might be sad if you also wanted Rune Factory gameplay along with it. Fact is, I recommend this!

This is a relatively well made nonogram game. However: This game's design/performance is disgraceful and easily correctable. 1) the default cursor is insanely bad and uncomfortable to use. nobody is used to an upside down cursor and should be expected to use one. Straight up remove this feature. 2) the game's 3d rendering is clearly in a lower resolution with no rendering assistance systems like anti-aliasing used. This might look fine on a nintendo switch, but on any other system looks terrible and lazy. 3) the cursor's behavior is confusing and distracting. The highlighted cell is highlighted in a special way, but it makes gameplay very difficult. I've played many picross/nongram games that use the mouse that don't use any special effects and this is not an issue. The visual effects of this game make playing this game more difficult than usual.

More nonograms is always a great thing and this one scratches the itch. I know nothing about Rune Factory and still enjoy the game. Controls could take some notes from Picross. Not being able to "paint" the memo markings nor wrap while "painting" is quite annoying but I still recommend. I fear the timed challenge puzzles may get very problematic for me without the wrapping and memo issue I mentioned before but I'll get one I can get done.