Pixel Puzzles 2: Space Review

I’ve never been one for jigsaw puzzles, I honestly thought the only reason people did them in the past was due to a lack of entertaining things, like TV and music or basically anything else that isn’t a jigsaw puzzle. Pixel Puzzles 2: Space takes all the fun of physical puzzle solving and condenses it into your laptop screen- much less mess and far less sociable.

Gameplay involves solving jigsaw puzzles- once the jigsaw is solved a lovely picture will appear, rewarding you for your patience. You click and drag the pieces into play and rotate them with a right click. The game will show the image temporarily, before fading away leaving you to solve it. The pieces then float around outside the jigsaw area, much to my annoyance as seeing them static would make it much less of a jarring experience.

There’s around 25 puzzles to be solved overall, all with varying amounts of difficulty. Some puzzles are a small 60 piece affair whilst some others max out at around 300 pieces. The game comes with a few different options, you can turn Vsync off if you wish and you can also turn the “HD” graphics off, although I‘m not sure why you would ever do this. The game doesn’t look that great, everything has a cheap feeling to it; much like the shoddy puzzle board your nan picks up for you at a carboot sale.

There’s some weird stuff with rockets and a launch pad around the border of the jigsaw puzzles. There’s also a little guy in a spacesuit floating around for some reason, it serves no real purpose and actually makes identifying jigsaw pieces a lot harder.

The game comes with some weird program that involves the Steam Store, showing the developers other jigsaw games. It’s similar to those Mega Drive and Dreamcast emulators that can be purchased on Steam, but much worse. It looks incredibly clunky and doesn’t really serve any purpose other than making you aware that there are other jigsaw games you can buy.

I can kind of see why some people might enjoy the “low effort” approach to jigsaw solving, it’s something you could probably stick on whilst watching TV, or even while you catch up on a recent podcast. Although there are probably far better low effort games out there for you to waste your time with, and there’s probably hundreds of them on Steam.

On the flipside, the social element of jigsaw puzzles has always been one of the biggest draws, so digitizing this experience it makes it much more solitary. Which begs the question, how long would you want to sit at your PC screen solving jigsaw puzzles on your own? I found myself getting rather bored after just a few hours of playing it for review.

I will say that this experience is going to benefit from those using some form of touchscreen device. Using the mouse to manually click and drag puzzles pieces is monotonous, so a touch input would make this process much less annoying. I can’t help but feel that this kind of game would likely be better off on a mobile store- Pixel Puzzles 2: Space would work so much better on a tablet than it does on Steam.

There’s not really a lot more I can say about Pixel Puzzles 2: Space. It works well enough as a game and will provide those who love jigsaw solving with a passable experience. That’s it though, unless you are a die hard jigsaw solving fanatic, there really isn’t any reason for you to pay any attention to this title. Poor presentation and just a general lack of options make this a mediocre game. Go dig out one of your nan’s old jigsaw puzzles, you can even sit and solve it with people then.