As you can tell by the title of this post, I do not under any circumstances recommend you play Nonograms Prophecy, even at its bargain basement price. (I think I bought my copy for less than 2 USD.) In fact, I think it should be removed from the eShop. But let’s start with something they got right before everything they got wrong.
Fill in the Blanks (and the Squares)
As nonogram game enjoyers know, the big game in town is Picross. And nowadays Picross will auto-X out lines that have zeros for you. However, it won’t auto-fill in lines that are fully filled. Nonograms Prophecy, however, does both! Well, you have to press a button. But still. I appreciate this.
Forgot to properly screenshot an example, but basically you press L+R on either 0 or full rows and it will auto-fill
People Love Color Picross
The other credit I would like to give is the large number of color nonogram puzzles. Not everybody is into color puzzles, but many are, and I know I always want more whenever I play a mainline Picross game. So the devs I think accurately measured demand for alternative game modes.
I mean…I guess?
Okay, that’s uh. Unfortunately it for positives.
#FLASHINGLIGHTWARNING again?!
Yes, I couldn’t believe it either. The screen flashes after you finish every puzzle. Ostensibly the reasoning here is the neoclassical theming leading to Zeus being involved, but.
I’m so tired.
And yeah, no option to turn it off. But that’s not what disqualified this game!
Hint Number Sabotage
One of the first Quality of Life improvements made to mainline Picross games was the hint numbers automatically greying out if you had already solved for them. Nonograms Prophecy attempts to do this too. But they didn’t program it correctly.
Notice column 2 and 4 have the first black number greyed out, even though the middle black number is the only possible corresponding number.
Experienced players know – wonky greyed out hint numbers is worse than no greyed out hint numbers. I really don’t know why they didn’t just not. Combined with the low contrast, this makes playing regular nonograms difficult.
Holy low contrast, Batman!
Larger color nonograms, however, end up close to impossible. Not only will the incorrect number(s) be greyed out, but you lose any visual indicator of what color that number was. Again, they could have just…not greyed out any numbers.
About when I gave up playing further
You Had One Job
At the end of the day, nonogram puzzles crucially have to satisfy one condition – the puzzles must have one, and only one solution, that can be arrived at using the hint numbers provided. And yet Nonograms Prophecy manages to not satisfy this condition! I came across both puzzles that seemed to have more than one solution possible, as well as puzzles I couldn’t solve from the hint numbers alone. Searching online, I found even worse complaints, such as puzzles with seemingly no solution whatsoever. This kind of fundamental failure should disqualify your game from sale.
I mean, this should be possible, right?
Miscellaneous Weird Choices
Why am I bothering to tell you about all this other stuff if the game is so broken I don’t think it should even be for sale? Well it’s interesting I think! I’ll just stick it in a pseudo-bulleted list though.
●They had fifteen 5×5 puzzles! For reference, each Picross S game usually has five.
Love the placement of ‘Baby carriage’ and ‘Gun’
●They have a 8×8 puzzle category, which is interesting!
Is that you, Mr. Krabs?
●They have a “Big Picture Mode”, which is similar to Clip Picross…but the pictures are actually pretty small?
For comparison, here is the smallest Clip Picross from S4
●Despite the neoclassical trappings, none of the puzzles seem to follow the theme?
Uh-huh…
Anyways, I sadly must reiterate that this game has such serious problems that it really is unplayable. Every third-party game I play, I appreciate Jupiter more and more. Picross really is still the gold standard in nonogram games.
kelp 