Moonlight - nonogram 4+

I’m a big Picross fan, and I’m pretty much always on the hunt for more nonogram games. That said, I can be pretty picky about what games I stick with, since Picross is very much about keeping my hands busy for me, so when the control method or UI interfere with my game, I’m quick to drop the game and move on.

This game was a very pleasant surprise! The puzzles are good and sufficiently varied. The UI/controls are very good. The game has a “one hand mode”, acknowledging the mobile nature of the game, as well as controls to replicate a D-pad experience. It’s easily the most optimized control set up i’ve encountered in mobile nonograms thus far.

The game offers both standalone puzzles which form a single image and multi-puzzle puzzles in which many little puzzles form a big image. The game tells a story via this latter, which is a good way of parceling out the narrative, in my opinion.

As for ads, the game offers a low cost transaction to remove ads, which is one of the first things i look for in any game i try these days so I can immediately buy it, but I actually neglected to do so in this game and have never seen an ad. I imagine this is a bug, but interesting nonetheless.

The game also gets points for using a darker/easier on the eyes color scheme. The number of games I’ve played that decide pure white is the best background color is quite high…. although, to be fair, sometimes having a colored background makes it hard to see colors or grayed out numbers.

This is the 7th game by this developer that I’ve played. They’re so good, I usually buy them, but the No Ads button doesn’t work in Moonlight. To make matters worse, the ads only work half the time. The rest of the time, they hang the program forcing me to close and restart it. As always, the puzzles are great and the game itself works flawlessly. I’ll change this review to 5 stars if the developer fixes the problem.

…if you hadn’t killed off the wolf in the most depressing way possible.

Seriously, dude.