Pixel Puzzle Collection

Solve the puzzles and collect fun pixel art of your favorite characters!

NA release: 9th October 2018
EU release: 9th October 2018
JP release: 9th October 2018
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Touch Arcade Review: 4.5/5
Platforms: Switch, Mobile
Version Played: Mobile

A mobile game from Konami with hundreds of nonogram puzzles – although most people will know them by the name Picross. You have a grid with numbers along the side, each number will show how many squares in that row or column are grouped together. So a row labelled 2 4 2 will have a set of two, a set of four and a set of two blocks, in that order. You’ll need to cross reference rows and columns and the final result will be a picture.

This is a free to play mobile game, but thankfully there are no power ups or microtransactions. There are only really two mobile elements; first are adverts in the menus (but never during a puzzle) which are easily bypassed by booting the game up with no internet connection. The second is that you have to wait a few hours between boss puzzles.

The boss puzzle is a 15 by 15 puzzle that makes up one portion of a larger grid, so you’ll only see a portion of the picture when you complete one. You can also only have three regular puzzles (on top of the boss puzzle) in progress at once, although you’ll probably want to complete them one at a time anyway.

Puzzles are part of select categories, some are generic like shooting, action and variety, but others are linked to franchise’s. There’s Castlevania, Parodius, Gradius and Bomberman. There’s also a School Girls category for some reason. It can be a pain trying to get a puzzle or a category you’ve got, but thankfully the selection is only from uncompleted puzzles.

So, you’ll get to do puzzles based on whips, Simon Belmont, Dracula collectables and more. Once you beat all 500 puzzles, you’ll get to play a harder mode, where you can’t mark crosses to help you visualise. This hard mode has a few additional puzzles, like a Kid Dracula Boss Puzzle. It’s a solid puzzle game, mainly because the core idea is a good one.

Fun

If you like Picross games or classic Konami and/or Hudson releases, you’ll probably get a fair bit of enjoyment out of Pixel Puzzle Collection. If you like both, you’ll likely pick the bones clean on this thing, something that will take more than 10 hours of playtime thanks to the rather large amount of puzzles. Setting aside the mandatory ads, this is one of the best things I’ve seen come out of Konami in quite a while.
Shaun Musgrave. Touch Arcade

Remake or remaster?

This version is fine.

Official Ways to get the game

Pixel Puzzle Collection is available on Android and iOS