Mystery Riddles Reviews

Fill-a-Pix. Good price for 100 puzzles.

Pretty bad technical quality. The resolution is horrible, the interface is not great.

Not terrible, but also not great. Too linear and lacking in quality-of-life features. If you're really into fill-a-pix puzzles, might be worth getting on sale, as there aren't a lot of other options on Steam. Nonogram fans, however, have better options elsewhere.

I heard about this game on the Co-optional podcast. I usually love these kinds of games and so jumped at the chance of buying it. The control scheme is a bit strange, though once you get used to it the numbers on the line when you drag are super useful. The colours are neat, but in some puzzles it gets kind of hard to see what's completed and what's not, espcially with gold and yellow tiles or in areas with a bunch of different coloured tiles. The theming is nice though, and the puzzles look pretty nice when you're done. The music is terrible and I turned it off immediately. All in all, it's a decent game for it's style but Paint It Back is FAR superior, especially at this price point.

TL;DR Overall a fairly solid puzzle game. 200 puzzles total, 100 of each type. Both feature multiple colors, although the colors only are a mechanic in the Fill-A-Pix type. In my opinion there's enough value here for the price (I got at least $0.50/hr). The game is not without its issues, though. One of the first things you'll notice is the "give us your email" popup. This made me very angry, given the price of the game, since it seemed like you couldn't turn it off, only "not right now". The third popup, however, does give you that option. 3 annoying popups, meh, it could be worse. The puzzle difficulty was pleasing to me, rarely being too easy (only the first 10-20 are 'very easy') and rarely being frustrating. That doesn't mean I didn't make a large number of mistakes causing me to restart puzzles, which brings me to my one major complaint: As a Red/Green color blind person, I struggled quite a bit with the Pic-A-Pix puzzles. The colors used for completed numbers in the clues were sometimes so hard to see that it caused mistakes. Also, squares marked as empty are faded into a colored translucent square, which also was hard to distinguish at times from other colored parts of the puzzles. Crossed out clues and the use of 'X's for empty squares (perhaps as an optional color blind mode) would be VERY appreciated. Other issues: Despite the appearance of a story, it is basically 10 locations on a map, each with a slight blurb about that location before the first puzzle. Don't expect anything in regards to story. Also, these random locations are not in any way marked with the exception of a name. If you quit the game and come back, it can be frustrating trying to remember which location you were working on. Click a location, see all the puzzles are complete, back out to the map. Click another... rinse and repeat until you find the right one. A simple checkmark or "path" or even a basic story you'd remember enough to know where you are would be great here.

I bought this game after hearing about it on the Co-Optional Podcast. I really dig picross puzzles and eat these things up pretty quick. I've done about 25 of the puzzles so far, of the regular mode. I haven't done any of the other mode yet. So far, the game isn't that great. Paint It Back is better. The way you fill in the puzzle, the game automatically colors it as you go along, making it somewhat confusing sometimes as to what you've done and what's left to do. The music is dumb, I turned it off pretty quick. There aren't any settings to turn the puzzles to a black and white color scheme rather than color, which would have been much better. Every few puzzles there's an annoying pop-up begging you to sign up for a newsletter. After a few "maybe laters" I put in a fake email address to make it quit coming back up again and again. If it was a couple of dollars I'd buy it. I wouldn't buy it at its current price point though.