Piczle Cross: Rune Factory is filled to the brim with nonograms to puzzle out, both in the traditional black and white and in a stylish colour mode, which turns a collection of 300 items, NPCs, and monsters into a whopping 600 puzzles overall. Ranging from terribly easy to incredibly difficult, this provides a fantastic range of experiences for those new to nonograms.
While the in-game tutorial does a great job at explaining the basics to you – how exactly a nonogram is solved and the changes that you must consider when trying out a colour puzzle – there are some tried and tested tips that will make your experience just that little bit smoother.
Start With The Filled Rows
A good deal of the puzzles on offer will have some rows that are basically ‘free‘ to fill in without much thought. Rows that need no logic to fill in since they completely fill up a row from edge to edge with their blanks and fills give you a good start to a puzzle, letting you get a better visual image of what the result might be and where rows and columns may lie.
Checking for totally fillable rows multiple times throughout a puzzle is a good habit to form, as you’ll be surprised how often it turns out a row or column is totally fillable based on a few things filled in.
Move On To Sides
After rows and columns that are completely filled with their clues, the next step should be filling in the edges if possible. Filled edges give you a wonderful starting point in many puzzles as you can start methodically working down a series a clues without relying on number-based guessing.
This is simply an evolution of the previous tip – fill out that which does not require logic before moving onto a puzzle’s actual challenges.
You Don’t Need To Fill An Entire Sequence At Once
A handy tactic for puzzles, especially the larger ones, is to fill in squares that you know will be filled even if you’re not sure where the sequence starts or ends.
For example, say you have a gap of seven squares and you know that it contains a single six-square sequence within it. Here, you know that the middle five squares will definitely be filled in, with the final part of the six-square sequence perhaps needing other parts of the puzzle to be completed before you can finish.
Once you’ve grasped this technique and moved away from the natural gravitation towards filling in sequences once you’ve worked out the entire string, you’ll start making far quicker progress with your puzzles.
Don’t Neglect Hints! Don’t Neglect Checks!
This game comes with two very handy quality-of-life options that can seriously ease the stress with a puzzle – if that sort of thing appeals to you.
The first is hints, which are, by default, offered to you at the beginning of each non-Challenge Mode puzzle. This will pick a square on the puzzle and fill in the entire row and column with all fills and crosses within. How helpful this is varies from puzzle to puzzle, and with which square it chooses to give you a hint with, so your mileage may vary.
What I will say is that for a casual player, it doesn’t feel like cheating to get a little push in the right direction.
Another handy option is the ability to ‘Check For Mistakes‘, which can be accessed from the pause menu during a puzzle. This will conduct a sweep of your currently-filled in puzzle and mark which squares are actually misses, and which misses are actually squares. This is handy in a few different situations:
- You’re coming to the end of a puzzle and need just a few adjustments that may arise from mistakes.
- You’re totally unsure whether a sequence is in the right place and it’s preventing you from making progress and you’re getting frustrated.
- You’re at a loss at the very beginning of a puzzle and just want a certain row, side, or column to be filled out to get you started.
As with the hint function, this is here to serve your needs as and when you come across them.
Neither of these features are applicable to Challenge Mode puzzles. You’re on your own with those!
Look Out For Symmetry
Many of the puzzles in Piczle Cross are symmetrical, and it’ll become clear quite early on in a puzzle if that’s the case. Once you’ve made that leap of logic, it becomes quite easy to purposefully visualise the clues in front of you as symmetrically occurring, letting you act more decisively with guesses and root out false starts.
Be wary of puzzles that only look symmetrical. Some puzzles are only symmetrical in certain parts, such as the top half or for the entire puzzle barring an edge.
A Tip For Colour Puzzles
Something specific to colour puzzles is that many of them make it far easier to tell where a certain sequence of tiles will go. Specifically, this happens when a certain colour has a longer string of tiles that can only fit in one area.
For example, if a puzzle has a string of four yellow tiles within a row, but there is only one string of columns that all feature a yellow tile, you know exactly where that four-tile sequence will go. This gives you a good place to start a puzzle.
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