Nonograms are like Sudoku’s chiller cousin: They provide all of the satisfaction of doing grid-based quantity puzzles, however with out as a lot of a threat of encountering combinatorial arithmetic. They’ve developed in all kinds of pleasant instructions with permutations like Picross, which rewards you on your square-counting abilities with a stunning little image.
Extra not too long ago, they’ve undergone an thrilling new evolution: Now nonograms can kill you! CiniCross is a brand new roguelike that hit Steam this week, and it turns nonograms not into footage, however right into a dungeon crawler—full with collectible artifacts, class development, and the joys of slowly bleeding out as a result of your mind would not deal with numbers significantly shortly.
I’ve been doing a healthy amount of that last bit.
A run of CiniCross consists of advancing through a branching dungeon of nonogram encounters with each floor culminating in a boss battle where your number counting is complicated by a Balatro-style modifier. After each successful nonogram completion, you’re awarded with randomly-selected artifacts that—and this is a statement I’m excited to finally be able to say—can introduce some wild mechanics into your nonogram strategy.
You might get an orb that reveals a random dud cell after a number of cell completions. You might get a glove that spares you a mistake every 20 moves. You could find a crystal spear that gives you a 3% chance to fill an entire column at once. I don’t want to sound like a sensationalist here, but I don’t think nonograms have ever had this kind of buildcrafting potential.
Unfortunately, you’re also racing against a timer that ticks down during every nonogram. And once your timer runs out, you’ll start steadily taking damage. If, hypothetically, you’re the kind of person for whom numeric logic puzzles entail a lot of staring at a grid until something finally clicks, you might find your run ending well before you battle your way to a boss showdown. But I wouldn’t know that, of course. I can count squares, like, really good.
Roguelike nonogrammetry is a potent combination, but the most exciting feature of CiniCross is its generous inclusion of an in-game clock. I suspect I’m going to be burning a lot of hours in these dungeons, so it’s nice to pretend I’ll be keeping track of time along the way.
I suppose this does mean the nonograms isn’t the cool-headed, laid-back member of the extended number puzzle family anymore, though. On account of all the killing and dying, I mean.
CiniCross is available on Steam now.
