“Musings in Nonograms” is a picross/nonogram game.
I’ve liked picross/nonogram puzzles for a while.
I remember playing Nonograms Katana around 2015 on my phone. Years later I discovered Pokemon Picross for the 3DS. More recently I found Mario’s Picross for the original Game Boy on Nintendo Switch Online. I’m not saying I play them all the time, but that I like them.
The video titled ‘Searching for the Perfect Picross’ (link) came across my feed last month. It mentions a lot of notable picross games (full list). I haven’t played a lot of these, though I’ve gotten around to some of them since this video came out.
One of the games it mentions is nonogram-adjacent: Proverbs. Proverbs is sort of a melding of picross and minesweeper, where you use rules defined on a grid to mark cells as filled or empty. Most nonogram games that I’ve encountered have you solve small puzzles, and the ‘prize’ is the resulting pixel art that you’ve uncovered from the rules in the puzzle. This is often a 15x15 sized piece of pixel art, though some are smaller and others are larger. Proverbs doesn’t have you solving a series of distinct small puzzles though. You’re actually solving smaller defined regions of an absolutely massive puzzle comprised of over 54,000 individual cells.
The entire puzzle is a depiction of the painting: Netherlandish Proverbs (link). Each region solved gets that region filled in with it’s actual colored pixels, and a blurb describing the proverb you’ve unlocked.
I started thinking through what a nonogram game would look like if the prize for each puzzle was a larger image, instead of a small pixelart picture. I remember Pokemon Picross having puzzles that were subsets of a larger puzzle, but that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I wanted the prize to be a hand-drawn image and my own personal thoughts, almost like a diary. Or, my own musings; which I know sounds a little pretentious, but I like “musings in nonograms”.