Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle
After the release of Voxelgram back in 2019, I didn’t manage to find another Picross adaptation that could live up to it… until I discovered Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle. The two games share a lot of common mechanics and similarities in the way they are designed and played. However, each of them brings a unique characteristic into the mix.
Voxelgram features Steam workshop integration through which a sizable number of players constantly unleash their creativity into crafting new levels, continuously adding to the hefty set of puzzles that the base game already offers. Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle’s innovative mechanic lies in using two fill colors instead of one. This opens up a new dimension of thinking and how one should approach nonogram puzzles, and the tricks you learned from dozens of hours of solving nonogram levels in other games won’t always work. This mechanic reaches an even deeper level of complexity when it is integrated with other restrictions such as having a specific number of gaps or groups for a row or column. The presence of two colors also requires you to think of both before you can safely remove empty blocks.
A notable difference between the two games is the handling of player errors. In Voxelgram, a row or column is highlighted as an error only if the numeric conditions are not satisfied anymore. Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle has a “hitpoint“ mechanic in which you start a level with five lives and each erroneous click costs you one life. Here you don’t find out what your mistake is because the game doesn’t show you along which axes you made a logical error. Additionally, with the condition of a maximum of 5 possible mistakes, Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle feels more restrictive than Voxelgram which allows infinite errors. On the other hand, in Voxelgram, because nothing is preventing you from continuing after you erroneously mark a certain block, that logical mistake can propagate until close to the end of the level and in some cases it might even be easier to restart the puzzle rather than backtracking your way to identify which block you incorrectly marked.
The team behind Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle is very open to players’ suggestions for making the game even more enjoyable and so far a lot of quality-of-life improvements have already been implemented. Things like being able to assign specific key bindings for the most commonly used actions, having the mouse cursor indicate the active color to help reduce potential mistakes, and fully unfolding a cube with one key press after several of its layers have been hidden ease the gameplay a lot. There are still a number of ways the user interaction with the game could be improved, for example, a button to remove all “0” blocks at the beginning of a level. This operation is redundant and there’s no reason not to have it automated.
One awesome thing in Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle is that a block changes its shape into the final one as soon as the row and column to which it belongs are fully solved (including the removal of the empty voxels). The end image isn’t formed from voxels but from blocks of various shapes, curvatures, angles and colors, which when combined form a 3D object. 3D nonogram puzzles already give the player a strong feeling of “sculpting” their way to a certain shape, but here you can literally see how the level transforms into something else with every block you solve.
In conclusion, both Voxelgram and Nonogram 3D : Mega Puzzle are great games and on par with each other, although unique in their own ways. Both are similarly priced, and both will provide dozens of hours of puzzly enjoyment.