Piczle Cross: Rune Factory Review – A Pleasantly Puzzling Crossover

I’ve always been drawn to nonogram puzzles, mostly through the many nonogram video games that exist these days. You’re perhaps not quite spoiled for choice, but in recent years, the style seems to have really taken off, thanks in part to the great Picross titles, developed by Jupiter Corporation, found on Nintendo consoles. But even beyond those efforts, you can find many developers who are taking a stab at the formula for themselves. This is where Piczle Cross: Rune Factory comes in. Developed by Score Studios, who have previously released Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons and Piczle Cross Adventure, they’ve turned their experience with nonogram puzzling towards the world of Rune Factory.

Personally, I have very little experience with the Rune Factory series itself, bar some time spent with the initial outing on the DS, but since I’m a fan of nonograms, there was at least some cause for me to be interested in giving this game a try. Even if my knowledge of Rune Factory is lacking, I hope to be able to walk away from this game satisfied by its puzzles at the very least, and in a best-case scenario, I might find myself venturing more into the Rune Factory series in the future.

A Piczle Life: Simple But Effective Nonogram Puzzling

For those who don’t know how nonogram puzzles work, allow me to give you a brief explanation. Players are presented with a grid of varying sizes, with each column and row having a set of numbers beside it. Those numbers act as hints, pointing you toward which squares on the grid need to be filled in. So you chip your way at the grid until you eventually create an image, which completes the puzzle. At first, puzzles are extremely easy as you might imagine, with small grids without much room for error. As the grids get bigger, though, and the hints get progressively smaller, you can spend a long while on just one puzzle.

To me, the appeal of this is the same sort of appeal you might get from sudoku or crosswords; it engages the brain but in a way that is quite relaxing. Yes, you can spend a lot of time butting up against one puzzle, but the ratio of frustration and satisfaction is quite well-balanced, in my opinion. Piczle Cross: Rune Factory definitely doesn’t falter on this simple premise and is just as competent as any other nonogram title I’ve played in terms of the core mechanics. It provides some good quality-of-life upgrades compared to several other options on the market, too, such as the ability to fill in a large number of squares in a single go, or you can even zoom in on individual columns and rows, which is a nice touch.

There’s a large number of traditional monochrome nonograms to complete, but each of those can also be played as a color nonogram, which is a style of nonogram that has a slightly different set of rules to follow. Progression in Piczle Cross just requires you to complete a puzzle in either variation, so you can rely on whichever you prefer. There are also collage puzzles that require the completion of several individual nonograms to fill in a much larger picture. If you would rather forgo puzzle unlocks or progression entirely, though, you can set the game to ‘Puzzle Mode,’ which sees all of the puzzles unlocked from the start. Add onto this a plethora of additional difficulty options, one of the greatest strengths of Piczle Cross seems to be offering an experience that can be tailored to your own personal nonogram taste!

I do think there is something to be said about the difficulty curve, personally; most nonogram games usually start things off by making you go through the smaller puzzles first before you tackle the much bigger grids, which can be frustrating if you’re a veteran, but is often good for newcomers. Here, the difficulty curve does feel a bit uneven if you’re playing ‘Adventure Mode’ as you are quickly thrown into much larger puzzles, but the customization and difficulty options might help you circumvent this.

A Modest Harvest: A Touch Of The Rune Factory Flavour

It’s when we start to cast an eye over to the Rune Factory portion of the title that things seem a bit underwhelming. The game’s visuals largely take assets that can be found in Rune Factory 5, and while I don’t know if this was an issue with the original game, everything here looks a bit rough around the edges. Naturally, the visuals aren’t the selling point of a game like this, but given that there seem to be some attempts to indulge in fanservice, I’d have expected maybe a little more care to be taken. I don’t even mind the reused assets. It makes sense for a cheaper spinoff game like this, but it is still a little disappointing.

I mentioned fanservice earlier, and that’s because Piczle Cross: Rune Factory includes a compendium, which houses art and references to other titles in the Rune Factory series, or at least the third, fourth, and fifth entries in particular. The music also pulls from these games specifically, and I imagine that they only pulled from those titles as three and four have modern ‘Special’ versions, and five is, of course, the newest mainline entry thus far. I can somewhat understand this reasoning, but I can’t help but feel like more devout Rune Factory fans will perhaps be a little disappointed that some of the other entries aren’t fully represented.

Perhaps the only other major factor that Rune Factory plays into this title is the customizable farm diorama. Completing certain puzzles allows you to customize your farm or your player character with crops, monster helpers, or new equipment. You can even unlock some of the spouses, so there’s definitely been some effort to reward the player for all of the time spent puzzling. Whether it’s a satisfying reward or not is up to the player. I personally do think it’s a nice gauge of your progress throughout the game, but ultimately, the real satisfaction comes from the puzzles themselves for me.

Verdict: Is Piczle Cross: Rune Factory Picture Perfect?

There’s not too much more to be said about Piczle Cross: Rune Factory; it’s a perfectly serviceable nonogram puzzler with ample gameplay customization and some welcomed quality-of-life improvements. There’s a large amount of content here to enjoy for long-time nonogram fans, while newcomers to the genre can learn the ins and outs easily. The Rune Factory flavor will surely be welcoming to those familiar with the series and beginner-friendly enough if you’re new to nonograms. If you’re experienced with nonogram games, you could do worse, honestly, and if you’re just looking for a bunch of new puzzles to solve, this will do quite nicely.