Squeakross: Home Squeak Home Review

I’ve been a fan of nonograms, also known as Picross if you want to get Nintendo-y with it, ever since I picked up a random free game on my phone in high school. There’s something so addictive and exciting about these puzzles, and I constantly find myself spending hours just completing as many as possible. However, after that first app, I’ve struggled to find any nonogram games that have been any fun to play. Either there are too many ads or the block selection process is oversensitive. 

That is, until I played Squeakross: Home Squeak Home. It is, without a doubt, the best nonogram videogame I’ve ever had the delight to experience. It’s stylish, robust, widely customisable from both a gameplay and visual perspective, designed with accessibility in mind, easy to pick up, integral to everything else the game has to offer, and best of all, it doesn’t treat you like an idiot.

Notably, Squeakross, developed and published by Alblune, isn’t just a collection of 650 nonogram puzzles. The game starts with you designing your very own little rodent in a surprisingly in-depth character creator. There are the typical features you might expect, like eye, mouth, head, and nose shapes or size meters. However, you can also find a variety of fur patterns (including no fur at all for that naked rat look), full colour customisation for fur and skin, ear damage, limb removal, and whether or not things like your rodent’s ears, tail, or toes have fur. I wound up making an adorable rat named Brie, but you can get a lot more wild in your design than I did.

Once you have your little cutie pie, you can get them started in their brand new house through the Home Squeak Home program, which sets rodents up with seemingly free lodgings. Walking you through the process is Nini, who soon lets you know that, while you don’t start out with any furniture, you can earn some through playing nonograms. This starts the basic gameplay loop of solving puzzles to earn and place furniture (or earn and put fun clothes on your rodent) to make your new friend’s house the home it can be.

Those nonogram puzzles, by the way, are excellent, and not only because the blocks you fill in the grid with are literally made from cheese. They start out simple enough, and an optional and succinct yet informative tutorial is there to get you up to speed, but you’ll quickly run into a wide variety of brain-teasing logical conundrums. Many nonogram games will leave you with only 5x5, 10x10, and 15x15 grids to solve, but Squeakross throws 8x10s, 12x15s, 8x8s, and more at you. I’ve solved around 70 puzzles so far, and I haven’t gotten bored yet, even though it’s taken me around six hours, so that’s a major plus.

To help you with these puzzles, Squeakross also offers a variety of settings to customise your nonogram experience. If you want, you can play the game as if it were on paper, with just the grid and clues on the sides with no other frills. Alternatively, you can make it so that any line with all blocks filled in logically will automatically cross out the remaining empty spaces for you. 

There’s also a dark mode, an option to make the dividing lines thicker and darker to up the contrast, and another one to make them spaced five cells away from each other. By default, the puzzles try to make these dividing lines cut up the puzzle into equal, smaller grids. Yet, for players used to 15x15 grids like me, dividing lines at every four or six cells can be disorienting, so I really appreciate this inclusion.

However, by default, Squeakross will use a colour-coded system to help lead you to the solution without giving it to you. The clues on the edges of the puzzle can either be grey, black, or blue. If they’re black, you can’t logically figure those rows or columns out with the current information, and if they’re grey, then you’ve found all of the filled-in blocks in that line. However, if they’re blue, that means you can logically deduce something about that line. 

Nini is very clear with you that you should never guess, and that there is always a way to figure out the puzzle logically, and she’s right. While some of the nonograms can be tough to figure out, careful examination of the facts presented to you can always yield at least some information, and that can be used to pin down more blocks, and so on.

Plus, if you find it hard to visualise where blocks could or should go, you have a few more tools at your disposal. First is something many nonogram videogames either forget to include or make way harder to use than it should be: notes. By clicking on the scroller on your mouse (heh, mouse), you can leave a blue circle that doesn’t affect your number clues on the sides. I typically use this as a cheat sheet to remind myself where possible lines of blocks could end so I can keep track.

Second, third, and fourth come to you from your little rodent friend in the bottom-right-hand side of the screen. There’s a cooldown associated with each option, but you can click on them in order to either check to see if you’ve made any mistakes, click on a given row or column to visualise the possible solutions in-game, or even let your friend solve a single cell at random. The best part here is that none of these options will somehow make your success any lesser. There’s no special ranking to chase, they won’t tack on extra time, and there’s nothing to lose by asking for a spot of help.

The last thing that I want to mention about Squeakross’ puzzles is the thing that truly makes it stand apart from a lot of the slop you can find out there: it has a click-and-drag feature that doesn’t hate you. In so many puzzle games I’ve tried, you can click on a cell to either add a block or a cross and then drag either vertically or horizontally to fill in more cells with the same selection. However, in most of those games, every cell in the line will be filled with your selection, even if it was already filled with something else. At that point, the click-and-drag function is useless. Thankfully, Squeakross understands this, and its version of this actually works as you’d hope it would — it’s a little thing, but it saves time and frustration in the long run.

Now, with how much I’ve gushed over the sheer excellence in how Squeakross approaches its puzzles, you could be forgiven for forgetting the home customisation side of the game. I’m not normally one for interior decoration, and this one isn’t an exception, but I was pleased to see the ever-growing list of options. You can find all your typical home appliances as well as chairs, beds, and tables, though more interesting fare comes later. Throw in the perk of being able to add as many as you want in a few select colours if you complete an additional challenging puzzle per item and you can go wild with the decor.

Completing the puzzles can also net you accessories for your rodent, and I found these a lot more exciting. Scarves, vet cones, sunflower seeds that go on your rat’s nose for some reason, and more are unlockable. I particularly love the random options, which let your rodent decide their own sense of fashion and just wear a different combination of clothes every time you watch them in their home.

Speaking of watching your rodent at home, getting to see what they get up to is probably the most fun activity outside of puzzles. Sure, you can click on different objects to prompt your rodent to go interact with them, but if you just sit back and watch, they’ll go about their day and find plenty of simply cute things to do, like eat, sleep, bake, and sit on the toilet. There’s even a special camera option where you can take a look at your rooms through different camera angles, in case you wanted to get a close-up of your rodent crying over an empty refrigerator.

There’s also one more customisation option you can earn through completing puzzles: stickers. Unlike the furniture or accessories, these are awarded through every five nonograms completed, regardless of which ones you do. They can be applied to the main menu, loading, and puzzle screens, and you can use as many as you want and adjust the size, orientation, and placement of them freely. Some are basic symbols, but there are a lot that are cute pictures of rats and other rodents. There’s even a couple based on pride flags, to my delight. Sure, I haven’t unlocked the trans flag rat yet, but I’ve got my rainbow rats peeking around my puzzles to show their support, so I’m happy.

It’s a little sad then that, even with all of this customisation, I haven’t seen much to do with the soundtrack. There is an option to turn off copyrighted music for streamers, but I might have appreciated the ability to choose between a few tracks. Thankfully, what’s there is a good supply of gentle and upbeat tunes that pluck along and keep me engaged with the nonograms. Plus, hey, who needs music when you can listen to your favourite rodent squeak at a customisable pitch anyways?

This may come as a shock to you, but I can’t find anything else to criticise Squeakross: Home Squeak Home for. Perhaps the home editing side of the game seems a tad light compared to other titles like it, but I’m not really here for that, and I’ve not even unlocked everything Squeakross has to offer, so it may yet prove that wrong. However, there’s no denying that this is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt giddy over solving nonograms. This has quickly become my favourite nonogram game, and if you’ve been looking for something to scratch that itch, welcome to your new home squeak home. On the other hand, if you’ve never tried a nonogram before, I can’t think of a cleaner or more fun introduction for you.