Oww, my fingers! My wrist! My elbows! They hurt! Damn you, stupidly addictive and frustrating game!!

Puzzle games are another genre of games I’m bad at, which is why you won’t see too many posts about them on this blog. A while ago, however, I was talked into trying Picross and I loved it. It was simple, fun, interesting and logical. I liked uncovering each picture in turn, unlocking new puzzles and new categories as I went along. I quit once the puzzles got too hard, though. I hate racking my brains for hours only to get the answer wrong anyway.

So, Color Cross. It’s just like Picross, but with colors. Instead of blanks and Xs, each space has to be filled with a certain color. There’s a panel on the side of the touchscreen that lets you cycle between colors, very cool. In principle, this allows you to create more vivid and more complex patterns than regular Picross can provide. And in practice, some of the pictures look great! I used to cross-stitch back in my youth (ahem), and I was often tempted to pull out out a piece of graph paper and record some of the patterns. Hmm, there’s an idea. That was only some of the pictures, though. Others were pretty obscure. I looked them up and down, turned them round and round and still couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be.

As with Picross, I gave up on Color Cross once the puzzles got too complex. You open up a puzzle and there’s like 7 different colors and all the graphs go 1 1 1 1 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 1 3 1, etc. Pshaw, as if I’m going to spend my time stressing out over these. The nice thing is that you can press Select to save your puzzle and resume it another day, so maybe I’ll peck slowly away at each one in turn every other day or so.

All in all it’s a good game. Picross was great, Picross 3D I really couldn’t get into, Color Cross is good but has four major flaws. First, once the puzzles get big, the squares get TINY. You can zoom in and try to work that way, but then unless you’re working on the edges, you won’t see the numbers you’re supposed to be filling in so it’s really hard to work. I’m not sure what Color Cross could do about it, because I remember Picross having the same problem. Maybe create an option to spread the picture over the top and bottom screen? I don’t know what would work, but as it is the larger puzzles aren’t much fun.

Second flaw, sometimes the colored backgrounds interfere with the placement of colors. If I’m working with light blue, for example, and the background is also light blue, it’s very hard to tell where I’ve placed the color already and where I haven’t. I don’t think the developers put much thought into it, because it should have been possible to make sure the background was a color that wasn’t in that puzzle, or to give the player a chance to choose the background color.

Third flaw, also related to colors, is that sometimes the colors are just too similar. I had to play the game on the DS’s highest brightness setting, and I still kept getting confused about whether I’d placed the colors correctly or not. You can see in the screenshot on the right a puzzle with three different shades of red in it. Definitely not for anyone with eye problems.

The fourth, and most annoying flaw, was the game’s lack of precision. You try to tap a square and somehow it reads that you tapped a different, adjacent square instead. Or that you tapped two squares or more. Then you get penalized for a mistake you didn’t make, or get rewarded for uncovering a square you didn’t know was right. I don’t particularly care about my time, but the penalty interrupts your game for a second or two, which is very annoying. At first I thought it was my stylus, or that I was just clumsy, but I later read a number of reviews and it seems the game is just bad at reading taps. It could have used a little more testing, that’s for sure.

Well, that was a fun diversion. On to the next game!

Related posts:

Picross 3D – Can’t…stop…playing… Picross 3D – Want… more… Picross DS Rezel Cross – Nice game. Pity about the stealth missions