Daylife in Japan – Pixel Art Jigsaw Puzzle

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Daylife in Japan, released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Jigsaw Puzzle game where the artworks being pieced together are animated pixel art pictures.

The artworks in question are quite nice, although some of them feature more animation than others. There’s also some question as to just how fitting for a jigsaw puzzle pixel art actually is, since jigsaw puzzles tend to require keeping a keen eye out for subtle details, and pixel art by its nature doesn’t generally have detail as subtle as a photograph. These images are backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s honestly a bit annoying, but I suppose it’s supposed to resemble Japanese music? I’m not quite so sure.

The gameplay here is fairly simple, without much in the way of options – you can choose one of five difficulty levels (number of pieces) for each of the game’s five puzzles, you can turn the music on or off, you can zoom to three different levels, you can look at the original picture for comparison, you can choose to highlight the side and corner pieces, and you can “re-shuffle” the pieces that haven’t yet been placed. That’s it.

Unfortunately, there are some control issues here. The cursor is far too stiff and unresponsive, and the game often seems to have trouble picking up pieces, and then sometimes puts them down without the player pressing the button to do so. It’s pretty disappointing when one of the worst parts of a Puzzle game are the controls. Also, the lack of an analog zoom function makes more difficult puzzles a pain, as they become much harder to see. At the very least the optional touchscreen controls here seem to work well.

At $4 for only 5 puzzles, Daylife in Japan is already a bit pricey for what’s included, but when you also have to content with terrible controls and lacking options, this game really falls flat. That’s a shame, because it would have been nice to see an animated Jigsaw Puzzle in a game that actually did it well. Unfortunately, this is not that game.

tl;dr – Daylife in Japan is a Jigsaw Puzzle game that has players piecing together five animated pixel art images. It’s an interesting concept, but one that ultimately doesn’t work very well due to terrible controls and lacking options. Unless you are a die-hard Jigsaw Puzzle fan, this game is just going to frustrate you (and even then, I’d wager).

Grade: C-

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