Pixelgrams review - Pixel art puzzles made less fun than that sounds

Jigsaw puzzles are great. There's nothing quite like sitting down on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a giant jigsaw puzzle and whiling away the hours putting it together.

As long as the jigsaw is uniform and follows a well-established set of rules, you're pretty much guaranteed to find success eventually.

Which is why Pixelgrams, for all that it tries something new and interesting, also fails to be anything more than an exercise and frustration.

Presented in a cutesy, over-sized pixel-art style, Pixelgrams tasks you with rebuilding the world inside your computer after the whole thing fragments beyond recognition.

To do so, you slot pieces of the puzzle together, making sure every piece is in exactly the right place on the grid.

So far, so good. The first couple of levels ease you in with giant pieces that could only go into one spot, and you'll be soaring ahead with ease.

Then suddenly you'll hit a pattern so bizarre or abstract that you've never encountered it in the real world before, and the puzzle pieces start getting smaller, and all the goodwill the game builds up is gone.

The problem isn't necessarily with the puzzles themselves, but more the art style, which is beautiful but obscures the solutions thanks to how big the pieces are.

Looking back at the smaller versions of the final solutions, you'll kick yourself for not figuring out the solution straight away.

But when you're zoomed in on the puzzle with nothing more than an outline and several huge blocks of single colours to work with, it can get pretty frustrating.

You can use a hint to reveal the end result (minus the grid, naturally), or to show you which pieces are in the wrong place, which can help in a pinch.

But forget what you've just learned and you'll have to spend another hint to see it again, punishing you for not memorising an image you witnessed for just a few seconds.

When you finally bumble onto the solution, it'll be because you've brute-forced your way there, not because of intuitive design or clever thinking.

Even Kitzel, the game's cat mascot who supposedly helps you in puzzles, just sits in the corner of the screen, occasionally offering up emojis to show if you've made the right move or not.

It's annoying that Pixelgrams is the way it is, because its cutesy presentation and overall premise would ordinarily be a total winner.

But with its frustrating puzzle design, abstract solutions, and terrible hint system, there's a lot holding it back from being just a bit "meh".

If you can push through the frustration, there's a fairly decent puzzle game in here. But it's tough to say whether it's worth the effort.