Throw together Sudoku and some coloured blocks and you have Pic-a-Pix Color, a charming little puzzler from Lightwood that brings form and order to the Vita. As neatly explained in the tutorial, each puzzle, be it a simple 5x5 or the larger, more complex grids, is described by vertical and horizontal lists of the colours in each array.
Follow the clues and you build up a picture, so a row of five yellows might be the sand, five blues the sea, one blue, three browns one blue the hull of a boat, a vertical line of browns the mast and so on.
With 150 puzzles to solve, you can take your sweet time dissecting each one, working out the logic, or just start throwing down paint and see what comes up. Aside from size, there's no real order, so some early puzzles are quite complex with lots of white spaces that might get people stuck. Younger players might want to look for simpler puzzles with long lines of colour. Perhaps a difficulty rating for the larger grids would have been a useful addition.
When a row or column is "right" the descriptors light up, but it's only when you plant the last daub of colour that you'll know if you got it all correct. There is a tip feature to highlight wrong moves, and switching between inks and correcting mistakes is all handled neatly on the buttons, with touchscreen controls feeling too fiddly.
Larger puzzles can take a lot of time, with more colours to cycle through, but you can save your progress to come back to one later, ideal for commuters. Zoom would be helpful on the larger ones, and from a competitive perspective, it would be good if the timer didn't start until you put down that first square of colour, and a feature to copy and paste identical rows would also be welcome.
Otherwise, with its bleepy tunes, this is a fun diversion and brain teaser where its a pleasure to see what can be achieved with a few bright lines and some dark shadows. Future pixel artists could start out here!
Score: 7/10
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Price: £6.49 (PSN)
Developer/publisher Lightwood
File size 96MB
Progress: I'm no Monet!
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