For over a decade, I have been on a quest: to find the perfect picross game.
“How hard can that be?” you may ask. After all, picross is a fairly straightforward puzzle format. You fill in squares on a grid using clues in each column and grid and wind up creating a sort of paint by numbers image when it’s all solved. It’s a format that has been done to death in video games and debatably perfected in Jupiter’s long-running Picross S series. But as my hunger for more puzzles has risen, so have my standards. I have become a total snob, honing in on the smallest nuances and voicing criticism for games that just phone it in with easy puzzles. Only a few games have cleared my bar, with the delightful Murder By Numbers previously holding the throne.
Now, there’s a new champion. After tireless years spent solving grid puzzles, I have discovered what just might be the greatest picross game of all time. Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is a new benchmark for a well-trodden puzzle format, and that’s thanks to all the rodent facts it has taught me along the way.
Squeakross isn’t any old picross game. While it does have players completing standard grid puzzles, it isn’t just content to offer hundreds of assorted challenges to solve and call it a day. Instead, it contextualizes all of that in a creative way that builds on Animal Crossing of all things. The premise is that I am a rat who has moved into a new home. After customizing my furry pal, I’m dropped into his empty room. I’ll need some furniture to decorate it, which I can order from catalogues. Rather than buying items, I need to solve a picross puzzle to reveal the item and add it to my inventory. If I complete a harder version of the puzzle, I’ll unlock the item’s color variants and the ability to place more than one of it down. The more puzzles I unlock, the more rooms I can decorate.
The picross element is fairly basic for the genre, though much friendlier to newcomers as it doesn’t punish mistakes. There are no timers that tick down if you fill a box in wrong. You also have plenty of hint tools to get you out of a bind if you’ve messed up somewhere. It’s a friendly introduction to the format, and that’s a great decision considering just how casually appealing everything around it is.
The real star of the package is home decoration, which essentially drops Animal Crossing’s Happy Home Designer tool in the middle of a puzzle game. When I’m in my house, I simply call up a list of every item I’ve acquired and plop it in the world. I can then pick each up, rotate it, and place it exactly where I want on a grid. My little rat wanders around the space and will interact with any object I click on. It’s an unbelievably high-effort setup for the scope of this game, as it features hundreds of different interactions. I can even unlock partitions to create nooks within rooms.
The package doesn’t stop there, either. I can unlock clothing for my rat and dress it up. I can use photo mode to take selfies in my house. Best of all, I have a rat email account which sends me information about real life animal charities with links showing me how to support them. Those emails also include rodent facts and adorable photos. (I also get the occasional chain email too, which as an unknown sender tries to rope me into some kind of seed ponzi scheme.)
Everything about Squeakross is the very definition of pleasant. The puzzles are meditative, the house decoration is satisfying, and the commitment to educating players about real rodents is incredibly charming. When I call it a perfect picross game, I really mean that. It’s one of the only ones I’ve played in recent years that embraces how comforting the genre is to fans and builds that out into a cozy getaway that isn’t just trying to deliver a cold list of puzzles. It doesn’t just use its wholesome label as an empty fashion statement; it is a force for good in these dark times. Squeakcross can save the world. Or at least it can save me right now.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.
