Game: Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams
Genre: Jigsaw Puzzle
System: Steam (Windows)
Developer|Publisher: That’s Nice Games
Controller Support: None
Price: UK £2.49 | US $2.99 | EU € 2,99
Release Date: December 1st, 2021
Review code provided with many thanks to That’s Nice Games.
Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams is a jigsaw puzzle video game that has a lot of freedom. You have the choice between tons of pictures to build, different music to listen to, and even a bunch of furniture you can decorate your puzzle room with.
The Gameplay of Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams
The gameplay of Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams is pretty simple; you have a table filled with pieces, a reference image, and a timer in the upper left-hand corner. There are also a lot of changes you can make to your surroundings; there is a massive library of different types of music you can listen to while playing, and you can change the furniture and stylings of the kitchen table you are playing at.
There are a bunch of artworks to choose from. You can even, and this is true, choose to play on the floor, on the coffee table, you can choose the number of pieces for your puzzle… It’s incredible how many choices you get with this game.
So now that you have made a comfy and cozy space and you have picked out the music for your jigsaw puzzle time, you can dive right into your puzzle time. As with a real jigsaw puzzle, you start with a big old pile of puzzle pieces, and you have to start putting them together. I feel like most people start with the edges and work their way in; I always begin by sorting the pieces in general color profiles, and then I go from there. Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams allows you to pick up multiple pieces at the same time, making it a little easier to sort them into piles.
It’s pretty easy to pick up, rotate, and lock pieces together, drag hunks of connected pieces around the board, and even move whole piles of pieces around if you want. They really put a lot of thought into how you would move the pieces around and put them together. You use both hands to play, moving the camera and pieces with the mouse while rotating with the keyboard, and it makes playing a lot easier and a lot more intuitive than the other jigsaw puzzles I’ve played.
The Pros of Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams
I am absolutely in love with the art of Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams. It is colorful and interesting, and there is a TON of it. The base game has 27 images, and there are a bunch of DLCs with a massive selection of pictures and new decorations for your little room. One DLC is a sticker collection you can stick all over your room if you wish. It is filled with stickers from other indie game titles, like Sticky Business, Celeste, and Baba is You. And, unlock many of the other art-based indie titles I’ve seen; the developers don’t use AI-generated images.
Every time you generate a new puzzle, the pieces are completely unique and cut slightly differently than anyone else’s. There is even a multiplayer mode if you want to put together some puzzles with friends. It’s a very relaxing form of jigsaw puzzling where you don’t have to worry about losing a piece, having the cat lay down across all your hardwood and ruin it, or having dust collect on the pieces if it takes you a while to get back to it.
Jigsaw Puzzle Games in General
So, if you have ever played a jigsaw puzzle video game on any platform, you probably have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to them. It is really, really difficult to make a jigsaw puzzle that feels good, mostly because it just doesn’t translate well into ludic interactions. It’s always overly complicated, hard to remember the keys to change things, hard to move the pieces, or impossible to flip the pieces over if you accidentally set a piece down weirdly on a pile of pieces and it flips itself over. I played and reviewed a game called Master of Pieces, and I thought that game handled things pretty well, but Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams does it even better.
I am absolutely blown away by not only the way you can interact with the pieces and the room but also the sheer number of options you have to tailor your experience. I cannot state enough how much of a hike in quality this is over the jigsaw games that came before.
If you have ever purchased a jigsaw game and gave up because it was just so difficult to wrangle the pieces into submission, you will probably want to try out Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams instead. You can choose how fast the pieces turn to the right and left, if the pieces are all identical or not, and you can easily zoom in and reposition the camera to make seeing everything as easy as possible.
Conclusion
Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams is the best jigsaw puzzle game I have ever played. It only has one issue: it is pretty graphics intensive. It seems to run my computer a little hot, but nothing my gaming laptop can’t handle. I feel that most people’s computers would have a little trouble keeping this running well. But if you like jigsaw puzzles and you have a fairly decent machine, you cannot go wrong with Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
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