The Piczle name on Nintendo Switch is for the most part anonymous with decent puzzle fun. This time around the Puzzle & Watch Collection ups the style significantly by modeling their game to a famous LCD handheld line.
Puzzle & Watch
The Game & Watch LCD handhelds were an early hit for Nintendo and inspired the whole line of handhelds Nintendo did. These handhelds offered a Watch and a rudimentary game hence the name. Most games were based around one screen and weren’t complex at all. To my knowledge, most of these games were based on action games. The fact almost none of these were puzzle games boggles me a bit. Especially after playing Piczle Puzzle & Watch Collection. The game replicates the look of Game&Watch to offer three different types of puzzle games: Piczle Cross, Piczle Pattern, and my favorite Piczle Loops. The slick look used to present these games adds a great visual element to these puzzle games.
Start with unpacking
The three different games are still in the box when you start the game for the first time. You need to unpack each Puzzle &W atch game. The animation used felt almost 100% true to the experience I had unpacking an original Game & Watch. The inclusion of foam, a manual, and even the batteries – albeit digitally – is a true homage. I have to applaud this attention to detail and congratulate the people at Score Studios for pulling on my heartstrings with this nostalgia trip. Once unpacked you can jump right if you want. I chose to flip through the digital manual instead and was again surprised at the number of nods to the original Game & Watch. I’ll stop spoiling it and instead urge anybody picking this one up to go for the full experience.
Piczle Cross
Piczle Cross sounds like Picross and is indeed Score Studios’ take on Nonograms. For those unfamiliar with Picross or Nonograms… You are presented with a 10×10 grid. On top of the grid and on the left of the grid, are numbers. These represent the squares in that particular row or column to be colored consecutively. By using logic and sometimes combining different numbers, certain squares can be made black or certain squares are certainly not colored. After you solve the entire grid an image is formed from the colored spaces. Piczle Cross offers 100 nonograms in mode A and 100 nonograms in mode B. Mode A gives you 3 lives. Each time you make a mistake life is lost and the aim is to complete it without depleting your life. Mode B just lets you go for your best time. Cause of the layout of the buttons I lost a few lives I shouldn’t gave making mode A a bit too stressful for my liking.
Piczle Pattern
Piczle Pattern also has two modes. Mode A offers the basic challenge this game was based on. You have to flip a grid with tiles from “empty” to black by using the “cross”. Each time you press the button, each tile on a cross pattern flips. It might sound simple enough but due to the cross shape, you’ll often undo previously flipped tiles. The order in which you flip the field becomes very important because one wrong move could mean you have to rethink your strategy all over again. Mode B offers even more challenges by offering a randomly generated grid with a few flipped tiles at the start. I wasn’t the biggest fan of this game, to be honest. It felt a bit too much like trial and error to me. Probably because I was doing it wrong but that’s beside the point…
Piczle Loops
My favorite of the three has to be Piczle Loops. Again the player is presented with a grid. This time around you need to add edges to the squares and forming a loop around the field. To know which edge you need, numbers are placed on the grid representing the number of edges a square needs. Using logical thinking will eventually result in edges being drawn and others being ruled out. With every puzzle getting harder, this game gave me a real challenge. I personally never played this type of puzzle but found it very refreshing. Never did I feel frustrated when solving because the solution was always there. You only had to look for it and use a bit of the old grey matter in order to see things clearly.
Conclusion
The Puzzle & Watch Collection offers two great puzzle games and one a bit meh. The way these games are presented is awesome but did limit some functionalities due to the lack of buttons. Once used to the layout everything is very much enjoyable but it took me some time to get used to as opposed to normal modern puzzle games.
