It doesn’t have many in-level music tracks (only about 9 minutes in total), so in order to not get bored it helps to load a playlist in another application. One downside of keyboard controls is that moving diagonally with the keys doesn’t really work, so I was restricted to vertical and horizontal movement. I was able to switch to the (remappable) keyboard controls, though it took longer to get from one place to another. Each puzzle has different-sized squares, so I couldn’t use mouse increments. Paint It Back, created by Casual Labs, can be played with the mouse or the cursor keys. It does get quite challenging, and it rewards you for how well you’ve done in a given level for full marks you can only afford 1 mistake per puzzle. There are only 36 levels, but because none of them carve out memorable shapes nor preview previous solutions, I find it easy to not-remember what a given puzzle is going to look like, making it very replayable. ![]() If you try clearing a square that shouldn’t be cleared, it corrects you, and counts it as a mistake. Sometimes it needs you to make use of the grey number near the bottom, which counts how many more squares need to be removed. Sometimes it leaves out some row/column numbers.Ĥ. Sometimes it gives you the total number of marked squares in a row/column, saying only that they have more than one grouping.ģ. Sometimes it refers to connected sets of squares in the middle of the grid.Ģ. It does add a few extra variants to the nonogram style:ġ. You can choose to have it with a white background or a black background. It has calming music and some interesting colors for the levels. The squares in each puzzle are always the same size, so only one set of mouse increments is needed, although the level selection screen has slightly larger squares. SquareCells, created by Matthew Brown, is entirely mouse-based, which allows for much faster movement, and makes diagonal movement easy to implement. The rest of this article covers the logistics and difficulties of the three games mentioned, which would mostly apply to all players. This means that on an off-day you may find the larger puzzles are unsolvable. The biggest source of stress is that when you have unwittingly made a mistake: this alters all the calculations you make after that, leading to a wrong solution with little indication as to what the right one is. However, once you know the necessary number you can accurately move that number of squares by speaking the commands, instead of moving the cursor along counting one square at a time like most players have to.Īll these games involve an escalating mental load, with puzzles taking much more time as they get larger. The gameplay does involve some mental arithmetic when it comes to counting where a given square or set of squares should be. ![]() When restricted to using the keyboard (which is slower), these commands move the selected square along a row/column by the stated number of squares:Īlso needed are commands for holding down the appropriate mouse/keyboard button in order to mark several consecutive squares as definitely being part of the pattern, or definitely not being part of it. These command sets can be used for efficiently moving the mouse by fixed horizontal/vertical/diagonal increments on a grid: But the puzzle solving is much slower with voice recognition, requiring remembering whether or not you’re holding down the button for marking/clearing, and it’s more difficult to move from one grid point to another.įor navigating these grids, I made a set of commands of the form “ ”, where the direction is up/down/left/right or a diagonal, and the number goes from 1 to 30 (I also include “ ” so I can say them either way round). Moving the mouse manually makes it very easy to colour in whole lines and clear whole sections and so on, efficiently solving the puzzle. This means not having to worry about those numbers anymore, and helps motivate by showing how far you are through a puzzle. These games generally grey-out the row/column numbers which have already been filled in and accounted for (meaning that you’ve put together the right-sized groupings that correspond to the grey numbers). Such games on computer are always playable with the mouse, and sometimes with the cursor keys. The puzzle is then to analyse the numbers and figure out which squares should be marked, and which ones should remain blank. ![]() Looking at a specific row/column, the sequence of numbers tells you the lengths of groupings of squares in that row/column which need to be filled in, with at least one blank space between each grouping. ![]() These games involve a grid of squares, and sequences of numbers lined up with each row and column of squares. SquareCells, Paint It Back, and Pictopix are “Nonogram”-style games (also known as Picross, Griddlers, and Hanjie).
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