Jigsaw Finale

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Jigsaw Finale is a Jigsaw Puzzle game released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021, containing 75 puzzles depicting or inspired by various nations around the world.

The images themselves look pretty good, with mostly some nice photographs and a few paintings thrown in for good measure. It’s everything around these images that’s an absolute mess. There are no menus, you’re stuck with the game’s menu options and instructions, such as they are, always being on-screen. The pieces don’t look like proper jigsaw pieces either, but simple rectangles with tabs on four sides either extending or cut out always in the same oval shape, meaning that it’s quite frequent that you’ll get pieces the exact same shape. All of this is backed by… no sound whatsoever. This game is completely silent.

As if the lazy presentation wasn’t bad enough, the gameplay here is a nightmare. You need to select pieces using the D-Pad but then you need to move them using the left analog stick (there are no touchscreen controls at all). What’s more, to use the menus you need to move the D-Pad over until they highlight, and then you must keep moving it left/right to select, even though the menu is vertically-oriented.

This entire setup is absolutely bonkers. Why can’t I use the D-Pad or analog stick for everything? Why doesn’t this game let you use any of the other buttons on the controller to bring up the menu or at least act as a shortcut? Why is the “Start New Puzzle button called “Create Puzzle” as if it’s tricking players into thinking there’s a custom puzzle creator in this game? Why does moving the pieces around work like a tile-swapping puzzle? And why is this absolute mess of a game priced at $5 when it’s not even worth the standard bottom-of-the-barrel price of $2?

There are just so many things wrong with Jigsaw Finale I don’t even know where to start this summation, so I’ll just focus on the ending – absolutely do not buy this game.

tl;dr – Jigsaw Finale is a Jigsaw Puzzle game that is an absolute mess of a game, with no sound, amateurish menu design, controls that are horrible in bizarre ways like the creator never even played a videogame before, no touchscreen controls, gameplay that feels closer to a tile-swapping Puzzle than a Jigsaw Puzzle… there is so much wrong here, you should avoid this game at all costs.

Grade: F

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