Game: Travel Mosaics: A Paris Tour
Genre: puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch (also on PC)
Developer|Publisher: JetDog Studios
Age Rating: EU 3+| US E
Price: $9.99 USD|$15.00 AUD|$ 13.22 CAD|€ 9,99 | £8.99
Release Date: 16th December 2019
Review code courtesy of JetDogs
I’m not the best puzzle gamer on the planet, not by a long shot. From time to time a game comes by though that I just can’t resist: colourful and with the promise of a logical puzzle that might just be fun to unravel. And that’s where Travel Mosaics: A Paris Tour comes in.
Meet the Walker Family
The game doesn’t exactly have a storyline, which isn’t surprising. After all, it’s the puzzles that are the stars here. But the developer has packaged them in a nice background. You follow the Walkers family on their tour of Paris to see the most famous and significant tourist attractions of Paris while learning a lot of new skills, answering tricky questions as well as collecting gold coins and souvenirs.
The Walker family is a strange one: I never knew animals of that variety could be related. A Sloth, a Black Puma, a Rabbit and a Squirrel. But then, this is fiction right? I like the way they incorporated them though: by winning enough coins in your puzzles you can get them souvenirs from the places you unlock. A nice touch.
Nonograms, Picross or Griddlers
Like I said, the puzzles are the real stars of the game. They aren’t exactly new, these kind of puzzles are known under three different terms (I didn’t know that! ) I immediately thought of Picross seeing them, but they are apparently also called Nonograms or Griddlers. There are 140 of them, so hours upon hours of gaming fun.
Every puzzle has a grid that is bigger depending on the difficulty of the puzzle. The numbers above and to the side indicate how many of the cells in the grid should be marked horizontal and vertical. And of course, there’s only one way to solve the puzzle. Instead of filling the cells with x, you now fill it with a mosaic dot in color. You see, the puzzle has several layers, all with a different colour. And if one coloured dot is in place, you can’t place a dot in a different color on one of the other levels. Am I making sense? If you’ve done it right, and abstract picture appears related to the landmark the Walker family is visiting.
Luckily, Travel Mosaics has good help screens in the menu, so before you dive in, it’s a good idea to check that out under the button with ?.
A little help is appreciated
You can play them on one of three difficulties. You can play on Easy, Normal or Difficult. The difference is in whether or not you need to switch the colours while you are puzzling away to get the image underneath. And whether or not the lines are automatically crossed out when you’ve discovered all possible combinations. It all depends on what kind of gameplay you want: a relaxed game or a big challenge.
I found the puzzles nicely challenging playing it on Normal. And you can only proceed to the next level go puzzles once you have completed the six main challenges with at least one star. Only if you manage to earn a minimum of two stars, a bonus level becomes available. And if you manage to complete that level two with a minimum of two stars, you unlock an additional puzzle.
That might seem easy, but believe me it’s not. A mistake is easily made. Luckily you can get some help. On the right side of the puzzle screen there are several icons. The big heart (with the 4 in the image above) shows the number of lives available, or the number of mistakes you may make. You can earn lives, but also loose them if you make a mistake.
The hammer can be applied to an empty cell, and it will make the coloured dots or black holes in the indicated area appear. The sun symbol gives you some coloured dots in their right place. The lightning symbol, when applied to a coloured square, makes the adjacent coloured squares appear. The bomb blows up an area, and makes dots fly random to spots in the puzzle.
These power ups fill up when you put dots in their rightful place. And you can also increase their power by spending the coins you’ve earned on that instead of buying souvenirs for the Walker family.
What makes this game stand out?
There are, of course, lots of Picross-like game to choose from. The Switch has several in its library. Not that I have played them all, but we have reviewed some of them on the site. What exactly makes this one stand out?
Well, for starters, it’s colourful and bright. And the gleaming dots that plop into place make a very satisfying plopping noise. The background music is nice and changes with the puzzle and the tourist attraction. The addition of info about the tourist attraction is a nice touch.
Playing on several layers with several colours makes Travel Mosaics stand out even more. And these grids are not walk in the park. The get bigger and more challenging as the levels go by.
Even though there are more of these kind of puzzles out there, this one, for me, adds good fun, color and a great challenge. It did me no good trying to play this with the telly on in the background. Nope, I really had to stay focussed and think logically about where dots can be and where not.
If you are a puzzle enthusiast and like excersizing the grey cells, I can really recommend Travel Mosaics: A Paris Tour.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot
