What is this? A Playdate game? That I purchased? With actual money? Is that even legal? It seems so!
Sketch, Share, Solve is a Picross game, and a $3 Picross game at that. It also has mostly the same (correct) controls as the Jupiter-written 3DS and Switch Picross games, which is good as that’s the only way to play them as far as I’m concerned.
As it’s on the Playdate, it’s all in black and white and the size of each puzzle is a bit restrictive because of the resolution. That said, every puzzle is 15×10, so although it doesn’t reach the 30×20 (or bigger) of the Jupiter ones, there aren’t any 5×5 or 10×10 which often only take 10 seconds to solve. There’s 250 of them too, so definitely $3 worth.
Also unlike Jupiter’s titles, the images you create are 1-bit pixel art representing exactly what you see. By that, I mean it isn’t a representation of a more complex image which is “filled in” with colour and detail when complete like the Jupiter puzzles are. That doesn’t make them any better or worse to solve, it’s just an observation.
What does make them worse to solve, however, is the fact that a handful of the puzzles require either leaps of faith because the logic suggests more than one possible location for filled squares, or they rely on the puzzle’s symmetry to solve. Neither of these are good practice in Picross titles, and although not many suffer from this it is a shame. Mind you, again, $3.
The only other negative I have isn’t the game itself but the Playdate. It’s quite obvious that the screen is Not Great when not in the right light. Natural light, at an angle, seems to give an incredible picture, but artificial light is nowhere near as good and since it’s November, the only real option. It’s the main reason mine has been a bit unloved of late.
