A bit late, but better than never, as the saying goes. Also, yeah, that was the best title I could come up with. It’s to the point! We’re reviewing Voxelgram! Also sorta Picross 3D!
Now in stereoscopic- no?
A while back, I played through the entirety of Picross 3D, a…3D version of Picross. Possibly confusing now, I can imagine people thinking “a 3DS release? do the puzzles pop out?” but nope. Instead of working with a 2D grid, you have a cube of destructible voxels.
Spoiler: It’s a puppy dog.
Developed by HAL Laboratories, it’s an astonishing piece of work. Tons of quality puzzles with charming animations and flavor text full of fun facts, questionable jokes, or both. There’s even a puzzle editor mode that would allow you to share your creations using the now defunct online services for the DS.
RIP Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection…
Of course, it’s not perfect – nothing ever is. Some of the background music available to choose from is a bit grating, or just…things like bird noises. The timer-based bonus system has a consistent problem where the ‘easier’ puzzles actually become incredibly stressful time trials, as you are given only five minutes and every second counts. (Of course, this does also become a problem with some of the last Big Boys as well.) I’ve mentioned multiple times on my stream that I’m glad the mainline Picross games moved away from a 30-minute countdown to a stopwatch that has no consequences. There’s a third minor issue I’ll address later, but all-in-all, it’s great! I still haven’t gotten around to the sequel, but it’s generally regarded as a pinnacle of Picross.
I won’t spoil this solution
Which brings me to Voxelgram. As you might have surmised from the name, it too is a 3D nonogram game. Some of the solves are a little different, but without getting deep in the weeds I can’t really explain it succinctly. (Don’t worry, we’ll wade in later on.) I finished playing this game on my stream earlier this year by request of a regular, and…it was a 3D nonogram game alright.
How Can I Solve All These Voxels?
To preface, I do think, as some have suggested in my stream chat, I am too hard on Voxelgram. I want to really emphasize this is primarily a consequence of just how great Picross 3D is. I’ve found in my experience of playing ‘offbrand’ nonogram games that they often fall extremely short of the expectations Picross, or more specifically, the developer Jupiter, has set. For example, they often have a barebones UI, with little to no quality-of-life. But even worse, sometimes they just don’t…work. I watched a little bit of an interview with the developers of one of these disappointing games, and they really seemed very enthusiastic about making a nonogram game…and not much else. My current theory is people just really underestimate how difficult it is to make one of these, and a 3D version is going to be even harder. That HAL Laboratories of all people managed to do so isn’t surprising, given their track record, but that’s like, the caliber it might take.
Anyways. Let’s start with a couple positives!
First off, all the puzzles worked. I know, I know – what a low bar. But some games don’t clear it! Even Picross games! (Looking at you, Mario’s Super Picross.) There also was a nice quality-of-life option that Picross 3D lacked; called “Skip Trivial”, it automatically removes zero rows and columns. This often took quite a chunk of time in Picross 3D, especially on larger puzzles, and was a ripe opportunity for erroneous inputs. Plus, in that game, every second counted.
One-button clear! That’s a thing right? Fellow gamers?
This, however, brings us to the first negatives, albeit small ones. The user interface had a lot of options, but they weren’t always explained well. Even just now, I went to retry a puzzle to refresh my memory of the interface (and also grab some screenshots for this review), but the only way to do so is to click a slightly ominous Trash Can icon, which resets the puzzle, and then you can do it over. This is three clicks, counting the “Are you sure?” confirmation dialog, to just…retry a puzzle. Puzzling!
That left icon? Not how you retry the puzzle
A bit more concerning was how they chose to display numerical information. Here’s where I get deep in the weeds. Picross 3D had three types of solves, which I’ll call Simple, Circle, and Square. Let’s look at a quick and dirty graphic to get an idea.
- Simple numbers work the same way they do in nonogram games – it’s a block of whatever number is given. In the example above, we could solve for the middle square.
- Circle numbers indicate that there’s one gap between two blocks that together add up to the number. This gap is at least one square, but can be more. For this example, the two blocks have to be 2 and 1, but if there was a larger number, like 6, it could be 1+5, 2+4, or 3+3.
- Square numbers indicate there’s two or more gaps between blocks that together add up to the number. For a 3, this necessarily means a set pattern of 1+1+1 block-wise, but the larger the number, the more possible permutations. Again, the gaps can be any size as well.
Voxelgram more-or-less follows this idea, except they make it more complicated. Or simpler! Depends on your viewpoint. Each number can have a superscript that indicates how many gaps. So no ‘two or more’ vagaries here. However, I think this additional level of information can, theoretically at least, lead to more complicated solves. But that’s not my complaint.
Now you see it…
Now you don’t!
See, one of the handy ways to solve these babies is to always have the puzzle at an angle, instead of looking at it straight on. This allows you to see both the numbers on the columns and rows simultaneously. (The other key is ‘slicing’, which is a key part of both the Picross 3D and Voxelgram UI.) However, this can easily lead to these superscript numbers being obscured. If you’re not careful, you might try to solve for a 4 block that is actually a 41 block. This can seriously bork your puzzle. My fellow voxelgramming regular Langstrand suggested that these numbers could be made a different color as a visual flag. Thinking about it again, however, I have to lean into my Picross 3D bias – maybe the whole concept of the superscript numbers is just a bad idea in general.
That’s not all, however. If you don’t go into the menu and select this “Rotate hints” option, you’ll have to rely on surrounding numbers to tell whether something is a 6 or a 9.
Something something hashtag nice.
I can kind of understand why this isn’t checked by default, but this is something Picross 3D dealt with with the time-honored tradition of…putting a line underneath the 9. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
Anyways!
Voxelgram organizes puzzles by theme, though not in the same way Picross 3D did. The latter would reveal at the end of a puzzle what ‘Collection’ it was part of, though not the name of the Collection itself. This meant I spent days, weeks, wondering what the hell a pizza delivery man had in common with sporting events. (Spoiler: it was all people who need to do things fast. But all the other people were athletes. Actually there might have been a stopwatch involved. Which is not a person, unless we’re dealing with some sort of Beauty and the Beast situation.)
Instead, Voxelgram went with a diorama approach, which I think has its own charm. I would prefer that each time you finish a puzzle in a diorama set, it would spit you back out into the menu, but that option may be available honestly. I didn’t dig deep into the UI until I was almost finished with the game.
This questionable chess board taught me about meeples
Kelp Gets A Little Mean
If you asked me whether or not I would recommend Voxelgram, I would say yes, as it’s currently the only 3D nonogram game I know of readily available on PC. I think that is really its biggest selling point, at the end of the day. We’ll put aside that some of the English text could have used a round of editing. (Please know, whenever I make this critique, it’s as someone who has been employed doing this exact thing who now struggles to find these freelance opportunities. I see an easy job I would have enjoyed lost. I don’t even cost that much!)
The Infamous Magician’s Tower
As mentioned earlier, I think it’s very difficult to make a game like this. So I would be fairly satisfied if one of the two conditions were met:
- The puzzles are fun and challenging to solve
- The puzzles are charming and well-designed aesthetically
Voxelgram, in my humble opinion, doesn’t check either of these boxes. Many of the larger puzzles are exercises in tedium, and please know I say that as someone who just enjoyed spending roughly 90 minutes solving a 30×30 Picross puzzle, that I already spent a good 45 minutes on earlier before throwing in the towel temporarily.
This really becomes apparent if you venture into the “Workshop”, which contains a bunch of user-created sets of puzzles for you to solve. The inclusion of a puzzle editor is extremely nice, so let me give credit where credit is due. But at least one person has taken advantage of this feature to create clones of Picross 3D puzzles, and solving a few of those really cemented the feeling of “ah, now this is a puzzle!”.
It’s not just the puzzles themselves – the final product is often…a bit wonky. I can’t hold Voxelgram to the bar of the animations present in Picross 3D, but even without comparing them to HAL’s work, there’s a lot of smushed faces and decisions made. The diorama aspect also often works against them in this regard; many items aren’t proportional when compared to the others, for one thing.
Untitled Goose Game except the Goose is larger than your yard waste can. And your wheelbarrow.
There also seems to be some suspicious recycling – for example, there’s two puzzles of a red fox, albeit in different poses. Lastly, some of the theming is a bit…tortured is a bit harsh, but I can’t find another word. But Kelp, there’s 250 puzzles! Sure, but Picross 3D has over a hundred more than that. Plus the flavor text!
But wait, there’s more
There’s one last thing that warrants covering, and that’s Voxelgram’s ‘Random’ mode. I thought at first it would just give you a random puzzle to solve from the dioramas. But nope, it randomly generates a puzzle, in your selected size and ‘pattern’. I did one of these and had no desire to do another. Maybe this scratches an itch for some people? Maybe that person is you? Clearly it was not me, but that’s a me problem.
My idea of puzzling purgatory
kelp 