[Review] Piczle Lines DX – Nintendo Switch

Piczle Lines DX

Developer: Score Studios
Publisher: Rainy Frog
Category: Puzzles, Board Games, Action
Release Date: 08.24.2017

Piczle Lines DX is a game in a long line of Pixel Puzzle games, a series of games that has become almost necessary on consoles now-a-days. There’s the difference between games that are more at home on PC type consoles and others that are more at home on mobile devices; Piczle Lines DX is definitely a game that could be seen on a mobile device. A brain teaser to its core, I became lost in the game and was surprised how much time quickly flew by while I tried to solve the puzzles.

Piczle Lines DX is a blend, almost, of Picross and Sudoku. Using different colored pixels to make an image, you also have to use your mind to figure out how to bend numbers to fit in to the puzzle. Unsurprisingly, this jigsaw-like game has found its way to mobile devices and has seen its fair share of space on the 3DS, also.

The puzzle begins as a blank canvas with colored dots spread throughout the canvas. The purpose here is to draw lines between like numbers and colors to complete the canvas and create an image. Once you do a few of the simple puzzles in the beginning, you think you’ve got this down pat…however the puzzles quickly become more and more challenging. I have had to start the puzzles over a handful of times because I messed up so badly.

The main draw is Story Mode which, obviously, has a story. Written in a fun comic-book style layout, we find that the professor has created a new machine, the Piczle-Matic 3000, which can turn everything in to pixels! Well, when it falls in to the wrong hands, everything in his laboratory is turned in to pixels and it is up to you to reconstruct them to fill his lab back up. With 100 puzzles spread over 5 Chapters, this provides for much engagement and fun.

But that’s not all! Puzzle Mode offers up over 200 more puzzles in different categories such as Dinosaurs and Horror. These were just as much fun to complete. In Story Mode you must complete the puzzles in order, yet in Puzzle Mode you can tackle the puzzles in any order you wish. Some of them have massive 128×128 grids, so expect it to take a while to complete.

Piczle Lines DX is priced a little steeply at $14.99, but it is still well worth the fun and investment. There are plenty of fun and challenging puzzles to complete. The best way, really, to play this game is as a handheld game as you can utilize the touch screen to draw lines between the numbers. I found this the most fun way to play the game.

The only major weak point of the game is the music. It is, to put it flatly, annoying. At least in the options you can turn it off, otherwise I would just have the volume all the way down. It would have been nice to have some variety to the music but, alas, we were blessed with a loop of obnoxious music that could have just stayed to the load screen.