There’s nothing new about picross games. Technically known as nonograms, paper versions of the grid-based number puzzles have been around since the 1980s, with video game versions starting in the ‘90s. I’ve tried my hand at a few in that time, but never found one that turned me into a devotee like so many others have. As it turns out, they were all missing the same thing — rats.
If you’ve ever played a picross game before, you know how to play Squeakross: Home Squeak Home. You start with a blank grid with numbers on two axes showing how many squares in each column and row are filled in. It starts off easy, especially being a paint-by-numbers exercise. The puzzles slowly escalate in difficulty, demanding more complex logical reasoning as the patterns you’re drawing become more complex. Squeakross doesn’t mess with the fundamentals of picross at all, instead making everything around it as joyful and approachable as possible even for players like me who’ve typically bounced off of similar games.
Squeakross is essentially divided into two parts — nonogram puzzles and a cozy decorating sim where you build a home for an adorable rat. When it comes to the puzzles, what stands out most to me is how Squeakross seems perfectly tuned to teach you how nonograms work as subtly as possible. There is a tutorial for any absolute beginners, but beyond that, its puzzles are presented in a way that made me finally appreciate and even start to love the strategy of picross.
The game is full of helpful and optional features that will cross out blank spaces left over when you fill a row or column, show when you’ve made a line unsolvable, and highlight lines where you should be able to logically place another square based on what you’ve already done. It’s this last feature that’s been most helpful, calling my attention to a particular part of the puzzle without actually giving me a hint about how to solve it so that I could start to work out common picross strategies for myself. Beyond that, you can call on your rat companion for more explicit hints, like pointing out where you’ve made mistakes or showing you all the possible solutions for a particular line.
Squeakross’ puzzles are the best introduction to picross I’ve ever seen, but that’s not the only reason I’ve been losing sleep to play it over the past week. Much like a rat, I’m a treat-motivated creature, and Squeakross offers rewards for every puzzle you solve. Each one grants you a new decoration for your rat’s home or a piece of clothing for them to wear. The decorating aspect of Squeakross is surprisingly robust, with hundreds of pieces of furniture to choose from and multiple color variations for each one that you can earn by completing more difficult puzzles. You can stack some objects on top of each other, section off parts of rooms, and unlock more rooms to expand your home. Once you place an item, you can even click it to have your rat interact with it.
It’s the excellent puzzles that really make Squeakross worth playing, but the most charming part about it is how sincerely it wants to teach the player to love the beautiful but unfairly maligned rodent that is the rat. In between puzzles, you’ll receive emails containing information about real-life rat rescues that you can support, as well as rat facts and pictures of various rodents — a feature that I frankly think would improve any game. For instance, did you know that rats can tell the difference between smells hitting each of their nostrils, which is how they’re able to track the source of scents so well? You do now, thanks to Squeakross.
Despite my love of rats, I initially ignored Squeakross when it landed on Switch and PC earlier this month, thinking it would be one more picross game I played once or twice and never touched again. Instead, it’s become all I want to play lately, and may very well have opened the door to the entire genre for me. Picross fanatics probably don’t need any more encouragement to pick up any new nonogram game, but even if these kinds of puzzles usually leave you cold, Squeakross might be the game to change your mind.
