Picross is the perfect puzzle game. Featuring quasi-Sudoku rules, where it’s a numbers logic approach that has you colouring squares in a grid to inevitably build a larger image, it’s a simple but genius design. Such boilerplate ideas lend themselves to many skins; we’ve had a murder mystery visual novel akin to Ace Attorney, where you’re identifying clues after solving Nonograms. Even Mario himself had his own foray on the Game Boy. What I can confidently say is that we haven’t had one where you control a mouse, building a little Animal Crossing-style house. Enter Squeakross: Home Squeak Home, one of the best Picross games ever made.
The meat and potatoes of solving nonagrams is exactly what you’d expect in Squeakross. A series of numbers is marked on each column and row to indicate how the groups of coloured cells should be. For experts like me who have played dozens of Picross games, you’ll be soaring and sprinting through levels in no time. Newcomers will, however, be thankful for how well Squeakross tutorialises players. It goes through each rule and how to look out for patterns incredibly efficiently and succinctly. Before long, I trust that new players will know how to find the recurring starting tiles for certain numbers (if a six is on its own on a grid that’s 10 tiles long, it’ll always be in the middle two tiles!).
Part of how you’re encouraged to take leaps and get better at the game is with the tools you’ve got to help you at all turns. There’s no clock challenging you to beat a level within a given time. There’s no tangible bonus for getting through a level without making mistakes (except personal bragging rights). Undoing mistakes is cleaner and easier than ever, allowing you to not just undo a single tile you just filled in, but an entire row or sequence of them if you’re no longer confident in that one prior train of thought you were entertaining. Without hyperbole, Squeakross is the most readable Picross title, even overtaking giants in the space like the Picross S series.
It helps too that the game’s filled with plenty to do and endless flair. There are over 600 nonagrams to work through, meaning it’s a game ill delightfully be chipping away at it for weeks, if not months on end. Tiles you colour in have a rubbery, cheese-like texture. What you’re crafting isn’t a painting but a piece of furniture, and that’s where the Animal Crossing of it all comes in.
Squeakross has you create a cute and furry rodent with plenty of personality, placing them in a home you’re tasked with decorating. So you open the catalogue and go looking for furniture or clothes to deck your mouse out in. You’re not dealing in bells or currency to unlock each item; you’re dealing in puzzles, and what’s standing between you and that new chest of drawers or bed is another nonogram. What’s standing between you and those objects, but coloured? More Picross, baby. This loop hooks you quickly, with silhouettes of objects giving you an inkling of what you’re about to unlock, and serves as constant new goals that are always just around the corner. You’re excited to finish a puzzle to place and look at what you placed, and you want to start another to get something else. Now that’s a loop.
You’ll be kept on your toes often due to the ever-changing types of puzzles you’ll be solving. Grids look quite dissimilar to those you’d typically approach in Picross games. Say you get a long lamp. The grids will be narrower but taller, like maybe only 10 tiles wide but 20 tall. This mixes up your way of thinking in a puzzle. Your usual approach of finding that one tile that makes the whole thing get moving isn’t as bulletproof and might need a few more good stabs before you crack it. It’s refreshing that even after playing about a dozen Picross titles, I’ve got a new one finding new ways to surprise me. Squeakross still has that issue that many of its ilk have, where not all images you’re crafting match the final result. If anything, it’s more charming here, as you’re crafting funky and uncommon objects and images.
I can’t overstate how much this is a game that’s bursting with charm and delightfully not paint-by-numbers. Your rat that you’ve crafted appears in the bottom right corner of all your puzzles, overlayed almost like a Vtuber, animating in different ways depending on what you’ve chosen their temperament (mine was a feral and munching many a snack) to be. Customisation options include many a pride item and merch, meaning you can make the gay pride chaos mouse of your dreams. Your rodent adorably interacts with objects in its home, dozing in a bed, playing with props, including the deep cut that is a toy keyboard, referencing the hyperspecific ‘Neil Banging Out the Tunes’ meme.
The best flavour text? The many in-game emails you’ll receive, providing authentic mouse facts, live pictures of mice or spam messages from a fake user promising an endless supply of pumpkin seeds. Unbelievably funny and charming.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is a no-brainer must buy for any Picross sicko or devotee out there. However, it’s also a great entry if you’re dipping your toes into the space for the first time, remaining very approachable and offering exciting and tangible progression and rewards. It’s available now on PC and the Nintendo Switch consoles. Check it out.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
