Piczle Cross: Rune Factory is a challenging, rewarding time. With 300 puzzles to tackle, in both colour and classical standard nonogram formats, the game is a true love letter to the Rune Factory series, specifically Rune Factories 3, 4, and 5. You’ll solve pixel art puzzles featuring the characters, items, and monsters from the series, recognisable and rare.
Progressing through the game is usually as simple as completing puzzles to unlock the next, but there are certain puzzles that have other prerequisites before you can tackle the fiendish challenges within. It’s quite a simple task, though, so don’t worry about it!
How To Unlock New Puzzles
The principal way to unlock a puzzle in Piczle Cross is to complete any adjacent puzzles. As you progress through the huge scroll of puzzles that surrounds your farm, you’ll move gradually from left to right. Sometimes, you’ll be forced to fill in larger, more challenging puzzle collages that can only be played in Challenge Mode (unless you’re playing on Puzzle Mode) – completing these boss puzzles is key to progress.
If you are playing in Puzzle Mode, you don’t have to worry about this – every single puzzle will be available from the start, with nothing to unlock. If you don’t value the ramping up of the game’s difficulty, pick Puzzle Mode!
There are some puzzles that will not be unlocked simply by completing an adjacent puzzle, though:
-
-
Panels marked with a sword icon contain monsters. You must first complete a puzzle that unlocks a weapon for your character. You’ll encounter many of these from the very start of the game.
You do not have to equip a weapon to take on these puzzles, though!
-
Panels marked with a fishing rod icon contain, ironically enough, fish. You’ll need to complete the Fishing Pole puzzle before you can take this on. The Fishing Pole puzzle is located directly to the right of the first boss of the game, Nine-Tailed Fox.
-
-
-
The speech box icon denotes a panel that contains an NPC puzzle – completing these will add Rune Factory NPCs to your compendium. To unlock these, you must complete the Greeting Spell puzzle, which is directly to the right of the Fishing Pole puzzle.
How To Complete The Fishing Pole And Greeting Spell Puzzles
5:08
Next
The Best Puzzle Games On Steam
The best puzzle games can hook even the most resilient players, and these puzzlers on Steam are some of the best ones available.