yayyy fun fusey

I finally completed it. It's a very sweet Picross game, not much more to say about it, but it really does not need to be anything else. Most puzzles are between 2 and 15 minutes, some are 30 minutes, and then the few bigger ones took me 1 or 2 hours to complete each.

For the base game, there are 280 puzzles on the main mode. Most of them you unlock using other puzzles you solved, so you'll probably do a lot of 5x5s and 10x10s at the beginning and unlock harder ones with those. There's a secondary mode with some more puzzles, these don't exactly make pictures like the others, they're more like... doodles, Emil (the one in the cover art) made. Finally, there's almost 200 bonus puzzles that, as far as I understand, came later after the initial release of the game. Those are a bit easier, even the bigger ones, but still pretty good. Those are all unlocked from the get-go, I believe.

There's also DLC, I have not played any still (that's what I will do next) so I can't say anything about it other than they're very cheap, which is appreciated.

As you can see, it took me around 120 hours to do all the puzzles (bonus ones included, but, again, not the DLC ones). I make a habit of not leaving the game open without doing anything, so the time is pretty accurate. That of course will depend on your skill and experience (I have played other Picross games, but not as much as this one, so I wasn't very good at the start). That's a very good amount of content, in my opinion.

The game has some "hint" mechanics if you get stuck, they seem to be very standard, like hinting which lines have a spot you can deduce whether you should mark it or cross it, or a simple "check mistakes" button. I can't say much more about it because I didn't use them. The game keeps track of what hints you've used, so it kinda encourages you to not use them, but I don't think it should bother you if you need any or none of those hints, do what you think will work better for you. For me it was just more fun to not use them, but that's just how my head works.

I mostly played this on the Steam Deck (like 99% of the time), it ran well, although it sometimes crashed the entire system when connecting the Deck to a second monitor while the game was already opened. That's why I always clicked "Suspend Puzzle" before ending the play session and putting the Deck to sleep. Just in case.
A small note, I discovered with this game that when you put the Deck to sleep, it doesn't seem to correctly stop the "playtime" counter on the Steam interface. Fortunately, It is not actually the case, whenever you close the game, the timer will correct itself. Just writing this because it bothered me at first, luckily I discovered this before making a habit of closing and opening the game every time i play.