First, my customary brief review so you don’t have to read my long ramblings – I can’t recommend CiniCross to anyone, but especially not to people who have difficulty with visuals like screen shake, flashing, or low contrast. While the developer does seem to be actively working to minimize visual issues, there are other flaws, such as the difficulty balancing, that may or may not be polished out in later patches. I think the decision to release the full game without first addressing how visually difficult it is is part and parcel of the developer fundamentally missing the mark when it comes to the overall core gameplay experience for the average nonogram enjoyer. This results in a game that crucially is about quickly reading and marking a numbered grid being incredibly hard on the eyes even for those with strong vestibular systems (couldn’t be me).
Second, there’s no screenshots besides a couple I grabbed from their itch.io page, because a) Steam sometimes refuses to recognize me pressing the screenshot key for whatever reason, and b) due to the aforementioned visual issues, I can’t easily just replay the game to grab more. I’d be more apologetic for the lack of effort here, but a lot of the things I’d want to show you would require video anyways.
Roguelike? More like roguelike-like!
(Actually no I think this is a roguelite. For all you keeping track.)
Far be it from me to discourage developers from doing something interesting with nonograms – I do think they can readily lend themselves to be incorporated with other game genres, like point-and-click adventures, or edutainment, or what have you. So when I was asked by a regular on my Twitch stream if I would try out the demo for a nonogram roguelike called CiniCross, I said sure! What’s the worst that could happen? (Spoiler: A Migraine)
Now, the first thing I need to get out of the way is: I don’t like roguelikes. I’ve just never really seen the appeal, personally. And at least a couple people agree with my assertion that, at this point in time, roguelikes are kinda trendy. Whether they agree that has lent itself to developers making roguelikes without really understanding all the factors that make them appealing to Gamers, who can say. But it’s not much of a stretch, and I do suspect that some form of that has happened here.
Why? Well, I’m not really sure who this game is for. And it really doesn’t seem to be for, say, the Picross crowd. I say that not because of my personal meh feelings towards roguelikes, but how the game constantly gets in the way of you solving a puzzle.
The Mesmerizing Mechanics (Negative)
The roguelike aspect is more or less what you might expect. There’s branching paths, power-ups, shop-type deals, et cetera. And as you might have surmised, by solving nonogram puzzles of varying difficulty, you can defeat enemies of…varying difficulty. Fail to do so fast enough, or make too many mistakes, and your health depletes. This leads to the first frustrating mechanic – screen shake.
Fun fact: Gobelin is a type of luxury fabric, featured on my website banner
Now, when I played the demo, there was an option to quiet (or perhaps mute?) a critical-health alarm. I think. It’s been a hot minute. But no option to disable the screen shake that also accompanies a critically low health bar. It’s one thing if a game has screen shake in a cutscene or what have you, but as I’m trying to read? This is an instant Game Over for Kelp’s Brain. (A subsequent patch for the full release mentions the ability to reduce screen shake, but unclear if one can reduce it all the way to Zero.)
I do understand The Vision here at least. A friend who played the game far more than I managed to reported running into bosses that make the numbers spin around, or flip the screen upside down to mess with you, and I get that decision as well. But he also reported feeling rather unpleasant as a result, and given that the whole point of roguelikes is to play them repeatedly…does dizzying your players make sense? (Future Kelp here to say, even the dev seems to be rethinking this decision based on recent patch notes.)
It Gets Worse
If CiniCross did these things just to purposely inhibit the player from solving nonograms, while I wouldn’t agree with the decision, I would have some empathy for it. A smidgeon. I do get rather salty about games I feel I should be able to play despite my photosensitivity and terrible vestibular system that somehow, someway, still make themselves difficult. (Looking at you, Murder By Numbers with your constant, needless, un-turn-off-able screenflashing anytime someone says anything the least bit surprising.) But no, that’s not all.
The power-ups that are supposed to aid you in solving puzzles are…curiously designed. First off, many of the basic ones go off randomly. Well, not randomly, but you don’t manually trigger them, like the abilities in a game like Pokemon Picross. (Nonogram veterans will understand the true gravity of the situation when I hold up Pokemon Picross as a Good Example.) Instead, they go off whenever you mark a certain number of squares, or Xs. And when they go off, there’s a lovingly-rendered flashy animation across the puzzle grid that is Really Distracting. In addition, many of these abilities fill in Xs or squares in a sort of scattershot way, which is dubiously helpful at the beginning of a puzzle, but mid-solve?
I think it’s at least a little suspicious that their own trailer doesn’t show any power-ups going off during the puzzle solves
When playing the demo, I quickly realized that I actually wanted to actively avoid certain power-ups as they did more harm than good. I know that dud power-ups are kind of a thing in other roguelikes, but I really don’t think that was the intent here. Instead…
Do You Even Nonogram, Bro?
Earlier I mentioned not knowing who this game is for, and in large part because I don’t get the sense that even the developer enjoys solving nonograms. If they did, would they not immediately find the same flaws with the power-ups I did? I promise it’s not just a me thing – the two other people who gave me feedback agreed that the power-up animations are, in one’s words, “flow breaking”.
The game also penalizes you for placing Xs in squares that are not, ultimately, Xs. This isn’t unprecedented, but most current nonogram games, recent entries in the Picross series included, don’t, to the point that I and other puzzlers routinely use Xs as placemarkers when solving, especially for larger puzzles.
But Kelp, it’s supposed to be difficult and stressful! Okay, but…who wanted this? I do know at least one person that really enjoyed Picross X : Picbits VS Uzboross, which revolves around solving randomized 5×5 puzzles as quickly as possible to defeat a Worm before he chomps on some lil’ guys. There’s even power-ups and what not involved. I personally wasn’t a fan, but that game was perfectly playable. At no point did the visuals make me ill. At no point did I think “oh, this power-up actually slowed me down”. And certainly at no point did I wonder whether Jupiter knew The Heart of a Puzzler.
Did They Do Anything Right?
Yeah, I’d say the visuals are very busy but very nice, when they aren’t trying to mess with me, which is often. The kind of low-res pixel aesthetic the game went for is also on-trend and in my opinion often fumbled, but I think they did a perfectly fine job here. The build I played had just gotten some BGM added, and that also seemed okay. But…
But What?
Well, when the game was brought up on my stream chat again after its full release, I was informed that there was a rather large discussion about accessibility happening on their Steam page. And what I found after poking around was…unsurprising at best.
First off, yes, there is indeed a number of lengthy discussions about accessibility happening…as an afterthought. Like, I get how other people would say “oh, the developer is listening to feedback and implementing options in patches” but I’m just so tired. Many of the complaints are about Frequent Accessibility Quandaries – along with the aforementioned screen shake, there are people mentioning they have difficulty reading the numbers or the puzzle grid due to color palette choices or lack of contrast. The time to address that kind of stuff in a game all about Reading Numbers is before it releases, not after. Why would anyone buy a game in hopes that there would be a future update allowing them to see well enough to play it?
Ah yes, let’s add an Easy Mode but also lightly shame anyone who plays with it on, fantastic
There were some other interesting threads in my cursory scan as well. A few that caught my eye had people alleging that the demo was tuned to a fairly high difficulty compared to the full release, which had put them or their friends off from puzzle-purchasing the latter. Having only played the demo for obvious reasons, I can’t confirm this myself, but I did very much get the sense from my friends who have played the full release that they got quite a bit farther than I did. I chalked this up to my visual issues at the time, but, well, jury’s still out I suppose. Looking at the reviews, there’s quite a few people mentioning that the endgame is in fact now laughably easy. The problem here isn’t so much the difficulty mismatch, but more confirming my suspicions that, along with this new addition of the “Pacifist Timer”, the game has likely undergone quite a bit of balancing downwards in difficulty as time went on, and my hypothesis of “maybe the fundamental concept needs a complete rework” is still on the table.
Speaking of said Pacifist Timer, there were indeed many vocal requests for a no timer mode. I actually mentioned this in a discussion on my community server, specifically that instead of an additional timer, why not just have your health bar depletion add time pressure naturally? As you can imagine, some of these no-timer requests were challenged by other users, both politely and rudely, in the sense of “maybe you should play a different game then”. And indeed, this gal sure did go play a different game! But given that the full release of CiniCross is part of a bundle with Squeakross, a nonogram slash home decorating sim that would definitely get tagged as Cozy, I again set forth “who is Cinicross for?” Roguelite enjoyers? People who like really flashy pixel art? That kid you knew in elementary school who would spin around really fast to make themselves dizzy for fun? Only time will tell.
kelp 