Glass Masquerade 4: Constellations
Glass Masquerade 4: Constellations is a strong addition to an already excellent jigsaw puzzle series. From a design perspective, it does not differ dramatically from its predecessor. While Glass Masquerade 3 focused on nature- and culture-themed puzzles, Glass Masquerade 4 organizes its content into seven constellation-based sets, each featuring lighter tones and distinct themes (such as love, knowledge, time, etc.).
Glass Masquerade 4 retains the puzzle modes and varied piece shapes introduced in Glass Masquerade 3. As before, players can choose their preferred settings (or a random mix of them), as well as the difficulty mode, ahead of starting a level. In “relaxed” mode, pieces are pre-rotated to their final positions, while the “high” difficulty mode requires you to manually rotate them.
Where Glass Masquerade 3 experimented with some unusual cuts for its classic pieces, Glass Masquerade 4 shows noticeable improvement in this area. The shapes feel more natural and fit together more intuitively, somewhat akin to the piece-matching from Glass Masquerade 1 and Glass Masquerade 2. That said, Glass Masquerade 3’s pieces were to some extent more attractive, often featuring subtle animations (such as a faint sparkle when held) that added a nice magical touch to the gameplay, despite this making the assembling process slightly harder due to the held piece showing different colors than the already placed ones. Many players also criticized Glass Masquerade 3 for abandoning the traditional stained glass aesthetics and replacing them with what strongly resembles colorful AI-generated imagery. Glass Masquerade 4 returns to a stained glass style, but compared to the first two games in the series, it adds a higher level of polish and sharpness to its images, making the textures feel less organic or hand-drawn.
Obtaining 100% completion in Glass Masquerade 4 is noticeably easier due to the removal of the badge system from Glass Masquerade 3. Previously, earning all badges typically required replaying puzzles to meet specific conditions, such as finishing within seven minutes, playing on high difficulty, using random settings, or maintaining over 95% accuracy. With these requirements gone, completion now simply involves experimenting with the different puzzle styles and solving every level in whatever way best suits the player’s preferred playstyle, without the added pressure of time limits (only one puzzle has to be completed in under 7 minutes) or other restrictive challenges. As a result, even though both games feature a similar number of puzzles (excluding DLC), Glass Masquerade 4 feels shorter overall. By comparison, Glass Masquerade 1 offered roughly double the content of later entries, while Glass Masquerade 2, despite having a comparable puzzle count, required completing all puzzles on hard mode, which unnecessarily inflated completion time to an average of around 20 hours.
Overall, Glass Masquerade 4: Constellations preserves the familiar formula and mechanics of the series while attempting a return to the stained glass aesthetics that define these games. Although it feels slightly shorter than its predecessors, it remains a stress-free, enjoyable puzzle experience, with an easy 100% completion.