Griddlers Victorian Picnic

Nonogram puzzles are a very simple concept, at least in theory. It doesn’t take state-of-the-art technology to design them either, but it can be rather tricky to come up with enough puzzles to fill an entire game. The said puzzles must also have clear solutions, regardless of how difficult they are, because luck should not play a part in the grand scheme of things.

Griddlers Victorian Picnic is a puzzle game in which you have to solve pixel mosaics by following a simple set of rules. However, the overall experience is anything but simple, especially if you are new to the genre and you are not aware of the mechanics yet. Even so, it only takes a few minutes to get used to everything, or even less if you are an avid puzzle fan.

In short, your goal throughout the adventure is to complete pixel artwork by filling the right tiles. In order to do so, you have to pay attention to the numbers displayed near every row and column, because they tell you how many have to be filled. It’s a fairly straightforward formula, but it needs to work right every time, which is why luck should not be part of the equation. Unfortunately, there are a few puzzles where the solution cannot be found using pure logic.

The mosaics you have to solve are not particularly impressive either, which is a bit of a bummer when that’s all you have to look at. Even if the finished artwork is supposed to represent some kind of object, the results rarely look like their real counterpart, even in a symbolic way. On the other hand, this is not a very important part of the experience, at least not if everything else works as intended.

As mentioned before, the unsolvable puzzles make an appearance a couple of times throughout the adventure, and you are forced to either use the hint system or try your luck. Obviously, this the one thing such games must avoid in order to be considered decent, but it somehow eluded the developers in this case. Moreover, the adventure itself is a tad too repetitive and boring to keep you engaged anyway.

When it’s all said and done, Griddlers Victorian Picnic could have easily offered a much better experience, but the developers seem to have given up halfway through. Even so, you can still have a bit of fun with the game if you are in a good mood.