Nono Adventure

Genre: Picross Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Nono Adventure, released on the Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Picross Puzzle game containing 300 puzzles, sorted into a Freeplay Mode and an Adventure Mode built around a story of an Indiana Jones-style character regaling you with a tale of his unusual adventure. In addition, the game also contains a Random Mode, which procedurally generates a Picross Puzzle for you, meaning this game has a potentially infinite number of Puzzles to tackle.

Nono Adventure features a fairly simple presentation that uses clean and easily-readable text and visuals for its puzzles, along with simple 2D cartoon artwork for its characters in story mode. I will note that the game doesn’t highlight the column/row you’re currently on like many games in this genre do, making it sometimes a bit harder to see how it lines up. These visuals are joined by a soundtrack with plucky synthesized themes that… honestly, I found pretty annoying. Overall, not bad, but definitely not great.

The Adventure mode’s story is pretty disposable and at times even incomprehensible. I definitely feel like this was a game not originally written in English that was somewhat poorly translated. Suffice it to say, you’ll soon find yourself skipping over it and just focusing on the puzzles.

The puzzles are fairly typical fare for this genre, with a few issues that I’ll get to in a bit. But first, I wanted to address the Random Mode puzzles. These puzzles don’t really resemble anything with a completed puzzle looking like a random mesh of static. I suppose that’s about what one would expect from randomly-generated puzzles though. Apart from this, these puzzles work about as well as the rest of the game.

Unfortunately, that is to say, there are some pretty major problems here. Let’s start with the smallest and work our way up. This game has no touchscreen support, everything must be done using traditional gamepad controls. This would be fine, except that the controls are clunky, with the game not letting you hold down a button to mark multiple cels – you need to tap the button for each cel you want to mark, which can get quite tedious. It gets worse – unlike most decent Picross games, there is no way to test-mark a cel to work through a theory or check something before marking it. You can only mark it as filled or empty, and the game automatically penalizes you if you’re wrong.

However, without question the worst thing Nono Adventure does is that it commits the cardinal sin of Picross Puzzle games – it features puzzles that can have multiple possible correct answers, and penalizes the player for guessing a correct answer that is not the intended one.

As much as the rest of Nono Adventure works well enough, albeit with a decent share of quirks and flaws, I feel like this last problem is fatal to any game in this genre – it punishes the player for trying to play the game correctly. With countless other alternatives in this genre to play on Nintendo Switch, this flaw makes it hard to recommend Nono Adventure. The only saving grace of this game is that the Random Mode does provide the game with potentially infinite replayability, as bland and directionless as that replayability is. However, even that feature suffers from this game’s core flaw, so players interested in a Picross Puzzle may be better off just moving on to more “limited” entries within the genre.

tl;dr – Nono Adventure is a Picross Puzzle game with 300 puzzles as well as a “Random” mode that procedurally generates a potentially limitless number of puzzles for players to solve. Unfortunately, this game’s less than ideal controls, lacking features, and puzzle design that can punish players for answering correctly make for a game that just can’t compete with the numerous other entries in this genre on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: D+

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