Not every Harvest Moon fan is going to love Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons, but every nonogram fan will.

This week, I got to play Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons and I had a lot of fun with it. If you’re unfamiliar with what that is, then you can think of it as a cross between Sudoku and Minesweeper. 

With nonograms, you’re given a row of empty columns with an accompaniment of numbers in each row. Using those numbers, you’re matching them against the other numbers around to figure out which squares to bubble in and which not to. By successfully filling in all the right squares, you get a pixel image of various items. 

The puzzles come in two flavors. The first is the normal puzzles that start out in a 5 x 5 grid and expand upwards as the difficulty scales. The other type is called collage puzzles. It’s where you work on several grids that will form a bigger picture when they’re all complete. 

I delayed dinner to keep playing Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons.

What I love most about this game is that there are several ways to play. You can play them timed or untimed. You can prompt the game to autofill in a row for you right from the start. And, you can even check if there are mistakes. This is a huge one for me because if I feel like I’ve lost my place, I can check to see if there are mistakes. If there are, they show up in red, and I don’t get penalized for getting a little bit of help.

Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons is a nonogram in Harvest Moon clothing. It would be like if Final Fantasy made a Sudoku game. The game is still Sudoku, but the imagery and elements around it are based on the game.

In this game, you can see the Harvest Moon characters doing farming in the background and as you complete more puzzles, more of the farming gets unlocked. This is all visual, you don’t do any farming here. 

So, who is this game for? Well, me. I’ll be the first to admit that there’s not much to the game. But, if you love doing puzzles like Picross, then you’ll love this version. I spent a lot of time grinding through the levels and listening to my own playlist and it was perfect just to empty my mind of all the stress going on. 

Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons is for puzzle lovers and fans of the Harvest Moon franchise. Once you get to the second page of puzzles, you start doing boards that create the Harvest Moon villager’s faces. I’m sure the more I play, the more I’ll be fed iconic images to unlock. 

Is it no-no-gram or non-o-gram?

In completing puzzles that feature the Harvest Moon iconography, you unlock pages in the Almanac. This, from what I can see, doesn’t affect gameplay. It’s just a cute little addition to bring even more of that Harvest Moon feel into things. 

And, lastly, the music featured here comes straight from the franchise. I never played Harvest Moon – I know, gasp – but even if I had that nostalgia for the music, I still would have turned it off in favor of my own playlist. 

You don’t have to be a fan of the franchise to enjoy it, you just have to enjoy this type of puzzle. But, hey, if you like both, then all the better, right? 

I highly recommend Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons for anyone looking to kill some time and finds these sorts of puzzles relaxing. The game is $9.99 and you get 350 puzzles to complete out of it. 

If you enjoy puzzles, but not this type, you can check out our review of Turlock Holmes. We didn’t personally love it, but that’s the nature of puzzle games.