People can't show me a colorful abstract puzzle game and expect me to not go completely crazy wanting to play it. In last week's Nintendo Indie World Showcase, I was presented to stitch., a game that was going out from Apple Arcade and finally going a version to the Switch. Your goal is to fill numbered grids to make beautiful images on embroidery hoops, the perfect mix and match of mechanics that helps my brain relax.

Looking into some screenshots of the game for the first time, you may think that stitch. is just a variation on nonograms (or Picross, for the Nintendo fans out there). In this case, you are wrong, but not too far. The team at Lykke Studios was inspired by another pen-and-paper Japanese puzzle called Shikaku — created by the famous company Nikoli, the ones responsible for popularizing Sudoku! — where the numbers are inside the grid, not outside.

In original Shikaku rules, your goal is to the divide a figure into rectangles, and each rectangle need to have only one number inside it, that will indicate how many grid cells are inside that specific shape. For example, if you see a number 6, the correct solution will have a 6x1 or a 2x3 rectangle with only this number 6 inside. Although stitch. follow all those rules, and even give you a classic Shikaku puzzle every day to solve, their approach to this formula make it a little bit easier, but more accessible and relaxing.

Getting inspiration from the embroidery theme, every level in stitch. is called a Hoop, a big figure that you need to sew with colored threads. Instead of showing you all the numbers from the start, the game divides the whole picture in smaller sections, each one with its own Shikaku puzzle. Some smaller Hoops will have 20-30 sections, but bigger ones have more than 100 little parts until you complete a full drawing.

As I said (and you may imagine), this simplify a lot the process of solving a Shikaku puzzle because most of its complexity is in all the possibilities that can happen in bigger grids. It's like stitch. is confirming your tries step by step, instead of making you a lot of progress without knowing if you are going in the right direction. If you get stuck, though, you can also use hints in any part of any Hoop.

If you are already a fan of those pen-and-paper puzzles, stitch. will seem a little to easy and maybe even boring. But for me, that literally plays Picross to get sleepy, allowing me to complete those amazing drawings without a lot of complexity was a perfect way to relax when listening to a podcast, for example. That said, here's a tip: some hard Hoops can need from you way more brain power than the rest of the game.

Having actual figures to complete and not just random grids are also a plus for me, because it gave a sense of really cool sense of completion, that I think combines really well with the whole sewing theme. Some of them are really beautiful also, an amazing visual job by the team. My favorite part is that some of the sections are a little bit curved to help create more interesting pictures, but still following the orthogonal rules of Shikaku.

Talking about content, you will have a lot of embroidery to finish if you want to complete all the challenges in stitch. The base game have 180 Hoops to play, and a new Weekly Hoop (inspired by current events or holidays) every 7 days help to increase this number. Even though it's a port of a mobile game, there is no ads or microtransaction locks: when you finish the tutorial, almost all the content are automatically available to you to tackle. You can even recolor your favorites in Free Stitch mode, if you are more artistic capable than me (it doesn't need much).

It easy to see what is the target audience for stitch. already completing the first level. Their goal wasn't to create a digital version of Shikaku for experts, but use the amazing rules of this puzzle to make a relaxing and visually appealing game to people that likes to turn off their brain with those types of challenges. As a declared fan of Picross, I can only say that those Hoops became also my favorite, and I just hope to keep sewing for much more nights before bed. (Yes, I'm asking for the sequel, I finish those games fast...)