[Review] Notenogram (GBA)
A lovely little homebrew nonogram game!
While talking about GBA homebrew games with my spouse we stumbled upon GBA Jam, an annual game jam on Itch.io where participants make their own new Game Boy Advance games. It gets a fair number of entries too, including this gem from the 2022 jam. Made by kva64, it's a rare entry in the particular puzzle genre of nonograms on the system: Picross wiki only has one official GBA release, by Hudson!
Notenogram takes its name from its notepaper-inspired aesthetic. The whole experience occurs over a grid paper background, every graphic from clue numbers and filled-in squares to the cute anime-style characters appearing as if drawn in pencil in a student's notebook. It's a fun idea, although it isn't the best for legibility, especially the number font.
The puzzle-solving gameplay is quite barebones, as expected for a game jam project. You can fill or cross squares, and undo these marks, while marking crosses doesn't overwrite fills (thumbs up). That's about it. There's no screen wrap, clue marking, hints, or checking, although the ever-present star character Omi will react with dismay if you fill in an incorrect square. The grids are all 12x12 which is unusual, and doesn't include thicker line markings on each fifth border, but I applaud the choice for fitting grids to the screen and graphics without sacrificing screen space or visibility.
The main mode includes 20 puzzles split into four categories: objects, nature, symbols, and portraits. The solutions are mostly recognisable but you'll have to squint at times as there's no shrunken cut-in, and you must commit them to memory as there's no record of you solving them. I will cut it some slack in these presentational aspects due to the short development time frame (3 months)… having said that, a few puzzles require extrapolation or outright guesswork to solve. To be fair, the tutorial does lay this out as part of the format but I always thought of it as poor puzzle design personally. It did feel a little freeing to accept guesswork as a valid strategy though, kind of a rebellious cutting loose from my preferred rigid logical solving, and Omi's reactions are helpful in these scenarios. Plus there's no penalty for mistakes, or a time limit, which is nice.
Well, there is one mode that grades you. Another option on the title screen is for Story Mode, which plays out as a short visual novel section that feels more like a proof of concept than a fully fleshed out experience. Omi is an anime girl who loves arcade games, and decides to try out a nonogram game at her local game centre (the script and tutorial often use the copyrighted term Picross as it's become generic colloquially). There's just one puzzle to solve here—bringing the total in the game to 21—and how well you do changes which character approaches you afterwards: a dweeby kid who struggles with puzzles, a fiercely competitive rival, or the middle option and my favourite, a girl who volunteers at a game preservation museum who is hoping to save the arcade machine from being doomed to obscurity. All three are friendly, wholesome encounters and this little mini-story is a cute addition to what can be a dry puzzle genre.
Aside from the tutorial which explains the concept well, a "Create" mode rounds out the package. It's very impressive to include something like this in a game jam project, allowing you to save up to 5 puzzles of your own design. Overall I'm very impressed with this small-scale homebrew; the aesthetic choices are strong, with the sketchiness and cute characters adding a fun layer, even if the pencil on graph paper look isn't the best for visibility. I was also just pleased to discover people keen to develop for GBA and that there are tools available to do so; GBStudio gets a lot of attention but it's nice to see other retro formats getting love too!
