Right off, let’s address the linguistic elephant in the room – actually wait traditionally I have one other thing to do first:

This game is worth purchasing if you have a Nintendo Switch, already know how to solve nonograms, and have already played through the Picross series. There’s some slight jank, but it’s perfectly playable, and features a puzzle editor. It seems to go on sale a lot (including right now, for $1.99 USD), and even at full price, I’d say it’s $6.99 worth of game.

Okay, back to my intro – minimal here means minimalist, in terms of design philosophy. I think. 

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You Think?

Well! Nonogram games are usually minimalist? Unless you’re talking about a game where nonograms are part of a larger deal, like Murder by Numbers, or Piczle Cross Adventure, or Squeakross– okay wow there’s actually a fair amount of these now. But yeah. Would you say the Picross S series was maximalist??

Well, Kelp, my favorite imaginary reader interjects, maybe this is minimalist in comparison, but …no? It has some color puzzles. It has a random puzzle generator, for you sickos into that. And it has a puzzle editor and a community function to share said puzzles. That’s pretty Bonus Content in my opinion.

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So It’s Not Minimal, Is It Good?

It’s okay. As I was writing up this review, I realized it would behoove me to make a standardized checklist for all the things I care about in nonogram games. So this will be a test run of my first draft.

General (yeah not the best category name)

So, the most minimalist thing about this game is there’s no tutorial, just a controls guide.

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Not really sure if Nonogram X was the working title that got left in here or what

I’m actually okay with this. I feel like the vast majority of people buying nonogram games nowadays prolly know how to play a nonogram game, and I imagine if you buy other common puzzle-type games, like say, sudoku, they don’t necessarily teach you how you solve that type of puzzle. Which brings me to the localization – I’m also not confident this team could write a good English language tutorial. Yes, a lot of it also depends on information structure and what not, but that’s arguably even harder. Outside of controls guide awkwardness, some of the puzzle names are localized…in a way, but this doesn’t affect much besides giving my stream audience an occasional bit of humor.

Clockwise from top left: Traffic, House, Omelette, and *wave*

The publisher Hook Games from prior research seems to be the second reiteration of an operation based in Ukraine – given that Hook Games’ website lists their earliest copyright as 2019, well…I can guess what happened there. They have a number of other puzzle games for the Nintendo Switch, as well as a few interesting looking point and click adventure games on both Switch and Steam. A lot of these list Konstructors as the developer, but with an empty former birdsite and an empty domain name…yeah. But their faceyb page (also dead as of 2020) lists Lviv, Ukraine as their location. At any rate, English is likely their second language, they seem like a small team, and this game doesn’t really hinge on localization the way say, Logiart Grimoire does. (Remember kids, Japanese snowmen wear buckets for hats.)

The hint functions are similar to Picross 3D, in that you can toggle showing possible moves and hiding completed numbers – the latter isn’t so much a hint function as QoL, but sure. If you toggle both off, you get the full three stars upon completion. Unlike Picross 3D, however, it doesn’t seem to contribute towards any sort of unlock requirement, and the hint functions provided overlap oddly (showing possible moves basically also shows you completed numbers). It would have made more sense to make the other option a hint roulette, or just have the possible moves option.

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The slightly redundant hint options selection screen

The standout thing here is the background music – it’s actually a nice ambient continuous mix I don’t mind using on my stream. Depending on your tastes, or if you always play without sound, this might not be much of a plus, though. There’s also one part that my brain auto-completes with Hotline Bling.

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Puzzles

Now we’re into the nitty-gritty. As mentioned previously on my Picture Puzzle Painting 1000! post, there’s 200 puzzle puzzles total, and the ratio of puzzle sizes in this game is more in line with what you would expect from a recent Picross entry. 50 of those are Color Puzzles, for fans of that mode.

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If you guessed “Frog” for this Color Puzzle, great job!

So far, the color puzzles sometimes suffer from difficult-to-distinguish color combinations, and unlike Picross, there’s no High-Contrast option to help mitigate when this happens.

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Are you good at that color sorting test at the eye doctor’s?

While some of the art is rather charming, there’s also consistently some reverse “Draw the rest of the owl” going on with some of the puzzles. However, I’m guessing this was a conscious choice to try to keep the solves more interesting, the sentiment of which I appreciate, if not the execution. To be more specific, many times puzzles have like, a few random particles thrown in that disappear in the completed picture.

Coffee, before and after noise reduction(?)

This was something that really separates out Voxelgram from Picross 3D by the way – some puzzles in Voxelgram were just like, a large 4-legged dinner table, and had no real puzzling to them. Picross 3D in comparison really went out of its way to create novel shapes. HAL Laboratory remains a cut above, speaking of which…

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A Puzzle Editor?

Yeah! As mentioned before, this is a big reason why I wouldn’t call this game minimal. You can make color puzzles too!

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Roughly 470 player-made puzzles are currently uploaded to the Community section, sortable by Most Played, Rating, and Date. How they display the puzzles is a bit confusing there’s no way to tell if it’s a Normal or Color puzzle from the selection screen. Additionally, the number of hearts indicate how many people rated it, with an additive/subtractive system. So if 3 people hit the Like option, but 1 person hit Dislike, it will show 2 hearts. This……ends up being kinda useless, as there’s not really a good way to separate out a puzzle that 210 people liked and 10 people didn’t versus one that 400 people liked and 200 people didn’t.

You can also rate a puzzle having never played it, which seems like an oversight. At least they did think of a report button.

I went ahead and played 5 of the most highly rated puzzles, each by a different person – 4, gently speaking, were Not Good. So I officially don’t trust the ratings. 3 of the puzzles were color puzzles, which are harder to make, but even on a curve…one community-made color one had eight (8) colors.

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That’s too many!

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Controls

Unlike Picture Puzzle Painting 1000!, the buttons work like I expect, with no dedicated erase button. There’s no cursor looping or count function, which I very much miss on the larger puzzles. You can’t change cursor speed either, but the default speed I think is fine. Most importantly, however, Nonogram Minimal does have Dominant Marking, which I realize is the thing I probably care about the most…provided the cursor speed isn’t weird. Sometimes the cursor speed is weird.

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UI/UX

The game is sometimes a little load-y, especially when selecting larger puzzles or when browsing the community puzzle list, but nothing like Pictooi levels of concerning. As for the number display, Nonogram Minimal sticks to square puzzles in a rectangular screen world. It’s not that bad, but I do wish more nonogram games respected the aspect ratio people are playing on.

One of the worst things about this game is the lack of contrast. There is a light and dark mode, which I appreciate, but the Xs are weirdly small and faint for…what reason?

Why?

The ground for normal puzzles is this mottled grey which can be kinda disorienting, but even worse for color puzzles the ground shifts from light grey to dark grey depending on if you’re on Light Mode or Dark Mode. This means sometimes a shade of grey is used that corresponds to the ground. Clearly they should have just banned grey from Color Puzzles. I’m serious. It’s the easy solution.

This was one of the Not Good Community Color Puzzles, but hey! No grey!

There also seems to be no way to view the pictures formed by the completed puzzles, which seems odd given they sort of tout the “beautiful hand-drawn pictures” in their menu screen. And your puzzle’s completion time isn’t displayed anywhere, just the highest number of stars you’ve earned. Yes, yes, ‘minimal’, but like I said, it is and it isn’t. It does track your time in the upper righthand corner as you’re solving, so maybe there is a way to view it??

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But You Recommend It?

I mean, not over Picross, no, but have I ever recommended anything over Picross? At list price, you could pay a few more dollars and get what is effectively “Nonogram Maximal”. But if you’re out of nonograms, or if this is on sale for a couple bucks, which it often is, it’s fine. Maybe one day I’ll play one of their point-and-click adventure games.