| Quick Verdict: Squeakross: Home Squeak Home isn’t just a nonogram puzzler; it takes the fun of figuring out the correct image and gives it a purpose. Each puzzle you correctly complete yields that specific item that you can use to decorate your space or your rat. It’s a lovely little way to wind down while expressing creative freedom. |
| Game: | Squeakross: Home Squeak Home |
| Developer(s): | Alblune |
| Publisher: | Alblune |
| Review Score: | 10 |
| Cozy Score: | 10 |
| Price: | $14.99 |
| Pros: | I loved the addition of personality. By letting us make our individual character, dress them up, and create a space for them, it made completing puzzles that much more satisfying. |
| Cons: | N/A |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Puzzle |
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is an adorable little puzzle game where you have to solve nonograms. If you’re unfamiliar with what that is, it’s a grid of squares with numbers along the top and a side edge that indicate how many boxes need to be filled in for a cross section to reveal the hidden picture. These grids can be varying sizes, with the smaller graphs being easier and the larger ones more complicated.
We’ve covered nonograms before with Piczle Cross: Story of Seasons, where each picture recreated a character or item within the game. In that one, you could almost see the code once you got a few lines done, but that’s not the case with Squeakross. In some puzzles, you can see the rough outline of what you’re making, but the perspective on items changes to unrecognizable shapes, so you can’t really see the image lines quite as easily.
Squeakross is unique in its approach because it is just nonograms at its core. However, you’re given several additional elements to tinker with that aren’t customary to these types of games. Naturally, as the name implies, you play as a little rat that you can fully customize. You can pick the fur pattern, two fur colors, different facial features, and even have a naked rat or one with a missing limb.
It’s a great way to get you to connect with the game, especially when the whole purpose of solving nonograms is to acquire furniture for your rat’s home. Each nonogram is either furniture or a wearable item for your rat to run around in.
So, now you have a rat you love and a creative outlet in setting up a little home. You initially start with one room, but you can decorate up to 5, so the customization isn’t limited to what can fit in the main area.
Watch the trailer for Squeakross: Home Squeak Home!
Speaking of customization, after so many correct puzzles, you’ll be rewarded with little stickers. Some of them are fairly simple, like hearts and stars, but others show pride flags and adorable rats in cute situations. You can use these to decorate the background of the main menu and puzzles. I’m completely charmed by the level of thought for personal expression that went into something that didn’t need it to thrive.
The puzzles are laid out like a little book with a spread of items across one page. When you’ve completed all of the puzzles on that page, it’ll open up a secondary puzzle page run by a rat called Nini. For Nini’s puzzles, it’s the same exact items as the page you completed, but the allure here is that by completing a harder version of the same item puzzle, you’ll unlock the ability to change the colors of that item.
In the normal puzzles, you just get standard colors. So, by completing Nini’s puzzles as well, you have even MORE ways to customize your drip and your space.
When completing a puzzle, you have a few different options available to you in how they’re presented. In the settings, you can toggle on or off things like autocrossing empty lines at the start of the page (for lines that have 0), auto cross completed squares which puts X’s down between block guesses, or, the best one, showing a warning for a line that is not solvable anymore due to answers placed elsewhere.
In addition to these passive settings, you have three hint types that you can manually engage. You can have it scan for mistakes so that it will highlight any answers in the wrong position, engage ‘logic assist’, which will tell you how many possible combinations there are in a row, or have it solve one square for you.
Listen, I love nonograms, but I’m not always the brightest crayon in the box. So, I love the hint system.
I found the hint of showing me my mistakes to be the most helpful. It’s also the one that kind of breaks the game in that it allows you to brute force every single puzzle. You can fill the entire grid and then have it show you the mistakes. It will illuminate the answer and you just have to get rid of the ones that aren’t part of the correct answer.
I’ll be honest, I used this method with Nini’s puzzles for when I wanted color variation on items immediately. And, you’re gonna get an achievement out of filling the entire grid. So… it’s kind of like being a horse led to water and they left it up to us on whether we wanted to drink or not.
Some people may see this as cheating, but I see this as a saving grace. There are just some puzzles that you don’t have the patience for. I know that as the grids got larger, my capacity to see ahead got narrower. Instead of giving in to frustration, I was able to just solve it and move on. With 650 puzzles, you can’t expect to master them all.
It’s a cozy game and there are no leadership boards. Who cares how you enjoy your own game?
Aside from the puzzles, you’ll get a few bits of mail to your inbox that will have tutorial hints, jokes, and rat facts. It doesn’t really add anything; it’s just a cute little detail.
That’s it. At its core, it’s just a puzzle game, but with the customization options, there’s a lot of warmth injected into something that’s normally pretty sterile.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is $14.99 if you’d like to give it a try. I think the price is more than fair when you take into account all the decorations and items you can utilize. If puzzles aren’t your cup of tea, you can check out some of the other reviews I’ve done, like the confounding Aquarist or the concerning Date Everything!.
