What I'm Playing - No. 188
Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!
Click a title to skip to that section. Games contained within this post:
Voxelgram (PC)
Released for PC in 2019 and for Switch in 2020, Voxelgram is an indie 3D nonogram puzzle game. It’s very similar to Nintendo’s Picross 3D. Both games take traditional 2D nonogram puzzles, and move the format into the third-dimension with spectacular results.
The premise is simple: you start with a box made of cubes, and the numbers on the cubes’ faces tell you how many in that row or column belong in the finished shape. From there, you logically mark blocks that should stay and remove the ones you don’t need until you’ve solved all the clues, and the finished object is revealed. You’re basically solving a bunch of 2D nonogram puzzles at once, stacked on top and intertwined with one another. It’s really fun! If you’ve played any Picross 3D, you already know a bit how these go. At first, the 3D nature of it all is a little brain-bending. That’s the way I felt when I first played a little bit of Picross 3D, and when I first played Voxelgram. But after you get used to moving around the puzzle in 3D and toggling through the layers, you start to realize a lot of the strategies you’d apply in regular old 2D nonogram puzzles still apply here. If you’ve marked some cubes at the top or bottom and there’s a clue for those columns or rows, then you can go ahead and complete that section since you already know where the marked cubes will start and end. Figuring out things like that makes the process much less daunting, and before you know it you’ll be tackling massive 3D puzzles without breaking a sweat.
If you make a logical error in marking or removing a block, it tells you right away. For instance, if you remove a cube and leave too few marked in the column or row based on the clues available, you get a red highlight letting you know so you’ve made a mistake there and should undo it. However, you might remove or mark some cubes that seem right at the time and don’t lead to any immediate logical errors, only to find out that you’ve messed up later on when you don’t have any way to complete another section. In that case, there’s the helpful Load Valid State button. This will automatically reset the puzzle back to before you made that first mistake. I definitely needed this in some of the puzzles, some of them I messed up multiple times and had to keep loading valid state until I figured out the tricky parts. Some of those difficult ones took me over 50 minutes! Luckily, you don’t need to complete a puzzle in one sitting. You can quit whenever you need to take a break and your progress is automatically saved for when you come back, which is really nice on the more difficult puzzles!
The main mode is the Diorama mode, where the puzzles you solve turn into little voxel objects in a tiny room, like a kitchen. It’s a very cute way to theme things, I like it. Generally, the puzzles in each Diorama seem to get more difficult from left to right. You can do them in whatever order you want, and you can even do the dioramas in any order. You don’t have to unlock them by clearing other dioramas first or anything. Besides the huge number of puzzles included in Diorama mode, there’s also Steam Workshop support with an Editor to create and share your own dioramas and puzzles. The editor for creating the dioramas isn’t built-in, but instead uses the free MagicaVoxel editor for creating the voxel-based diorama and puzzles. Then you can import them into the game and it generates clues for them automatically. If by some miracle you were to complete every single puzzle from the Workshop, and you’re panicking thinking “how am I going to play more Voxelgram now!?” Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay, because there’s also a Random puzzle mode, where you can play randomly generated puzzles. You could literally play this game forever and never run out of puzzles.
My final time to complete all the puzzles in Diorama mode was 25 hours 31 minutes, but I’m still playing this game thanks to the Workshop support, and I’ll probably be playing it off and on for a long time.
