Indie Game of the Week 439: Voxelgram

If there's one thing I love besides exploraction games, Zeldersatzes, and subgenre names that'll never catch on, it's nonograms. If you follow my monthly rundowns at all you'll probably be familiar with how often I'm tinkering away on a bunch of numbers and grids during idle moments and continuing to rack up masteries in RetroAchievements for ancient picross games that, due to how easy it is to cheat at them, are always worth an abysmal number of points. King of the Picross for many fellow fans are the two Picross 3D games, one each for DS and 3DS, that took advantage of the stylus and touchscreen controls to create little sculptures you could chip away at through the hint guidance provided. Procedural Level's Voxelgram is one of the few Indies I've seen to take on the 3D version of this format, and I dare say it's one of the best picross games I've ever played. But hey, cart before the horse here.

My issue with the Picross 3D games is one of a fundamental nature. Because in the "reality" of the game you're carving off parts of a block of marble to manifest your creations, mistakes are harshly penalized and instantly repaired or else there'd be no way to continue: this meant punitive action for any simple misclick and those are extremely easy to make with the imprecision of a touchscreen with a relatively tiny resolution to work with, especially as you go beyond 10x10x10 grids and the individual blocks become that much smaller. It was due to this ruleset that, for as much as I enjoyed the game in abstract, actually playing it well—well enough to earn the best rewards, at least, which typically meant zero mistakes—was deeply frustrating to the point of wanting to quit several times. Voxelgram steps around that issue by completely obviating any sort of scoring system whatsoever and, perhaps slightly messily, has implemented a means of replacing lost blocks should you accidentally remove something critical to the solution. There's the undo button, of course, which is the easier way to recover from misclicks and legit errors alike, though there's also a suite of toggles that switches the function of the left click (right click removes blocks by default). The game keeps these functions and the controls visible on-screen at all times, conveniently, so even if they can be a bit awkward to switch between and use the game does what it can to ameliorate it.

Voxelgram also has an interesting structure with various game modes. The main mode, Diorama, offers 25 environments each containing ten puzzles: as you complete puzzles, the resulting objects are placed into the scene for you to admire. What this does is creating an ever-fluctuating difficulty curve where the ten objects in any given diorama will get progressively, and then reset when you begin the next diorama. I actually find I prefer this to the slow progression of incremental difficulty increases because the easier puzzles work as a nice breather between the longer and more elaborate ones. The game can stretch to what looks like a maximum of 12x12x12, or 1728 blocks in total, so the puzzles can get pretty impressive in scope and might demand more than a few minutes of your time, though most are far smaller. As well as the Diorama mode there's a user-generated Workshop mode that seems pretty well attended to; as of writing, it features more than a thousand puzzles you can download and start pecking away at, each similarly packaged in a diorama-style set with several others. Like a LEGO set, some of these dioramas might be scattered individual objects while others could have you working on one giant item, like the Death Star, a sports car, or a hospital. Finally, there's a Random mode that generates solvable puzzles that otherwise don't resemble anything, presumably as a way to practice your skills because creating nonsense noise in picross strikes me as completely pointless (there's achievements attached to it for solving up to 40 of these chaotic nothings and I have to wonder why they exist, besides maybe the designer being hard-pressed to come up with achievements).

Visually you're just working with a bunch of monochrome cubes that only take form and color after the puzzle's complete, if still absent textures and the like. Naturally, objects that are already mostly square-shaped tend to come out better than spherical ones in terms of realism. Seeing the diorama of them all together afterward can be rewarding, as it helps lessen the abstraction of these blocky facsimiles as well as being visually appealing. I'm not sure what to make of the music: the goal is always to find tunes that aren't distracting and provide a soothing, puzzle-solving-abetting ambience to keep your brain cool, and that's mostly the tone here too, though the music can be oddly mesmerizing at times too. It sounds like the kind of BGM you might hear in a mysterious elven forest or when the heroes communicate with a godlike intelligence ("Vigil" from Mass Effect is a suitable approximation of what it's going for). It's beautiful stuff, but also slightly excessive for a game where you're poking cubes around to make block sculptures; either way, it's nothing worth criticizing too much. The interface is just fine, making it easy to move around the grid and it keeps the hint numbers facing you at all times, though I'll admit to getting annoyed by how often I click and drag to move the image around only to accidentally have my cursor within the grid: this causes extra blocks to be added to the indicated spot which then need to be quickly removed before they create too much confusion.

Voxelgram feels like a game created by someone who is in lock-step with my sensibilities, at least as far as what makes picross/nonograms so compelling and relaxing to play, and that "when doves cry" moment alone was almost worth the price of admission. By scrapping the elements of the Picross 3D games that made them just shy of perfect, Voxelgram is as close to nonogram nirvana as you could hope to find either in the Nintendo second-party big leagues or the Indie set. That it continues to expand, both with its user-generated content and a recent sequel, is testament to the smart decisions that went into creating a better version of what was already one of the finest picross games available to buy. This is absolutely a game I could see myself losing dozens of hours to, if I didn't think "losing" was an undeservedly detrimental way to describe what playing a game like this feels like. "Healing" might be closer. It's not 100% perfect—like most picross games you really can't play it in super long stretches before the repetition starts setting in, and the business of replacing cubes you can't just "undo" to fix can be very fiddly due to how tough it is to specify one particular cube space in a giant 3D grid—but it's real hard to fault otherwise. I'll have to make a beeline for that sequel once I'm done with the 250 puzzles included here and as many UGC ones that strike my interest (and maybe still find time for other games this month...).

Rating: 5 out of 5.