Animated Jigsaws: Beautiful Japanese Scenery is the first jigsaw puzzle video game on the Nintendo Switch.
For those who don’t know what jigsaw puzzles are, here’s a short explanation. It’s the most common technique in puzzles where you put together several pieces with all kinds of notches and edges that connect with each other in order to create a large image. The more pieces you have, the more difficult they are to complete. Animated Jigsaws: Beautiful Japanese Scenery brings this type of puzzle solving to the Nintendo Switch and can be played both in TV and handheld mode. While it’s nice that you have two modes to play the game in, I recommend using the handheld mode.
Handheld mode recommended
Most of the screen is (obviously) reserved for your puzzle. This leaves little room to assign to your unused puzzle pieces. All the pieces of the puzzle are placed in the upper part of the screen, with an additional space on the right side that you can use to temporarily place pieces that you want to use in the near future. While this extra space does help in keeping an eye on what pieces you have left to use, the limited space results in most pieces laying on top of each other, making it difficult to differentiate them from each other and to select the particular piece that you want to use. Using the touchscreen controls is more accurate and easy to use than the Joy-Cons since the on-screen pointer moves too slow and has trouble recognizing different pieces when they’re not laying apart. The downside of the handheld mode, though, is that the small screen makes it difficult to easily identify puzzle pieces. It’s not a big issue with the 60-piece puzzles, but when you’re playing the 120 and 240-piece puzzles, you’ll often struggle to find the piece you want to use next.
Animated images
The game comes with ten different puzzles and all of them can be completed with 60, 120 and 240-pieces. Each puzzle displays an animated image of a real-life photograph that was taken in Japan. All the photo’s look great, but the animation clearly loops after a few seconds. It’s not a big issue, but it would have been nice if the animations were edited in such a way that they would seemingly go on forever, instead of obviously starting over again. The animations also make parts of the puzzles easier to solve, since only parts of the images are animated. This makes it easier to separate the animated pieces with the non-animated ones.
Multiplayer
The game also comes with some form of multiplayer, in which you can solve a puzzle with up to four players. It’s a nice addition in concept, but in execution, it doesn’t work that well. Trying to pick and place pieces while three other people are trying to do the same thing is too chaotic to be enjoyable. The four pointers on your screen are easy to mistake with each other and the low accuracy can sometimes result in two players failing to pick up different pieces because the game thinks they’re trying to pick the same piece. Limiting the player count to two and good co-operation makes this mode playable, but even then you’ll probably want to go back to playing on your own since that is the fastest and easiest way to solve these puzzles.
Conclusion
Animated Jigsaws: Beautiful Japanese Scenery is a simple puzzle game that can be enjoyed by jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts who own a Nintendo Switch. The TV mode is less accurate than the handheld mode but makes the 120 and 240-piece puzzles easier to solve since you have a bigger screen and thus can easily identify the smaller pieces. The multiplayer mode is too chaotic to be enjoyed if you play with more than two people. In short, the game is an enjoyable experience but is best-played solo.
