[b]TL;DR summary: An interesting spin on picross, but needing guesswork rather than logic to finish puzzles is a cardinal sin in this genre.[/b]
It could be argued my thumbs down is petty, because I still went through all of the puzzles, so I must have enjoyed it (completionist OCD aside), and that's mostly true. Depixtion is a fresh spin on the tried and true picross/nonogram formula, adding two new dimensions to the puzzles. What the store page emphasizes is actually the less important of those two - the fact that each puzzle has three layers (red, yellow, and blue) means that the final image being full colour isn't a cheat of arbitrarily assigning colours to black and white pixels, it's actually the result of accurate colour mixing of the three layers. And while that sounds impressive, from an actual puzzle perspective it's mostly meaningless, since the layers don't interact - all it really means is each picture has three separate, self contained puzzles that may have common themes but do not actually influence each other.
Far more interesting, and for some reason less emphasized, is the fact that these puzzles are not binary, they are "trinary" - each pixel is not black or white; it is light colour, dark colour, or white. The logic rules are similar, but with an extra layer of depth I found refreshing. This was what actually made Depixtion a unique experience compared to the other picross puzzles I've done.
So why the thumbs down? Three failures on the part of the developers, the first unforgivable:
1. Some puzzles are not 100% logic solvable. I don't care that they're 99%, this is a basic must-have in any logic puzzle game. Having to use guesswork on the last few pixels is aggravating. And to be clear, I tested this thoroughly - on several puzzles I was able to fully solve the puzzle, but not have it be the correct layout. The game even auto-greyed all the clues, proving it was solved, but it wasn't the desired solution. This isn't that I just wasn't good enough to solve them, it is that many of the large puzzles literally have multiple solutions. [b]FAIL[/b]
[Url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2002293368]Example of "incorrect" solution [/url]
2. The greying out of clues to mark them as solved is automatic only, and broken. It only works from the ends inward, so even if you've completed a middle segment you can't mark it as solved. Furthermore, the automatic greying is a hidden "mistake finder" - I noticed when cycling through the four options for a pixel (blank, light, dark, or X) that sometimes the clue would only grey out once you had the correct "cap" in place, instead of simply greying out when you had the right length of pixels, regardless of what the next pixel is marked as. So the game drops accidental, and in my case unwanted, hints about whether or not you're correct. [b]FAIL[/b]
3. Insulting achievements. I hate achievements for sucking, and this game has ones for using the "find mistakes" cheat. And since I neither need that crutch, nor am willing to fake being stupid to "earn" them, I won't get 100% achievements. There's also an achievement for taking more than two hours to complete a puzzle, meaning you can get slapped with this for simply forgetting to pause the game correctly. (I'll admit this was not the case for me, I "earned" this achievement by actually taking more than two hours to solve one particularly difficult puzzle). Conversely, the achievement for solving all the 24x24 puzzles without the show mistakes crutch is called "Be honest, you cheated". No, I didn't, and that label is doubly insulting considering the fact that I even found the "correct" solutions on my own when they couldn't even design their puzzles 100% logic solvable in the first place. [b]FAIL[/b]
So if you're more forgiving than me, maybe this game is worth it, especially for an experienced solver looking for a fresh spin on the picross formula. But I can't recommend it.
