Really fun game, admittedly I had to bruteforce my way into a lot of the puzzles because I just kind of suck, but I still really enjoyed it.

I probably would've enjoyed a lot of the art and the detective story too, if half the pictures didn't show up as black squares with a green outline and a green diagonal line in them.

i've never played a game like this, very cool!!!

The best puzzle games are the ones with silly little stories. I enjoyed this so fucking much. If this were a full game with like 80 puzzles and different cases, I'd totally drop $60 on it. It's just so charming and fun. I fucking love puzzles. I owe you my life.

rip tom fulp

May I congratulate to everyone who made this amazing game possible? I love the music of each level, the music at the end, the voice acting and overall story. Just recently I discovered these types of games and despite I still have to learn how to master them, thanks to this game I am finally understanding the basics and logic behind them. It was a really nice brain stretching and exercise that combined a nice balance between difficulty and reward for reaching the solution of the homicide.

Graphics are really cool and enjoyable to watch while solving each nonogram, music helps to concentrate and the challenge has the right amount of difficulty to make it actually interesting and cool. There are many types of solving techniques, the most common are simple boxes, simple spaces etc. To solve them I tried to reason on a single row or column at a time only, then trying another row or column, and repeating until the puzzle is complete but for more complex parts of each level I used the "what if?" reasoning. I searched for contradictions, e.g., when a cell cannot be a box because some other cell would produce an error, I thought "it must be a space" and it worked. A mix of forcing, glue, joining and splitting, and a bit of mercury helped me through the final levels, notably the 4th and 5th. Contradictions are very useful especially after tried an empty cell or space. Basically this procedure includes:

1) trying an empty cell to be a box (or then a space)
2) using all available methods to solve as much as possible
3) if an error is found, the tried cell will not be a box for sure. It will be a space (or a box, if space was tried)

I've also discovered that solving nonogram puzzles is an NP-complete problem. This means that there is no polynomial time algorithm that solves all nonogram puzzles unless P = NP. Little excursus: P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved. Since this game was made for Pico Day, and reading the wiki page mentioning that Pico likely would have majored in computer science if he had entered college, I now image him playing a lot with the P versus NP problem just for the fun of it XD

Scroll down the comments below Tom's post and his reply to Oatmeaal back in 2021 and you will find what Pico would have become if events of Pico's School never had happened: https://tomfulp.newgrounds.com/news/post/1182469

Besides the mere element of solving the nonograms, I also enjoyed how this game combined art and gameplay. Each artwork played a role in composing the piece of evidence and this made the gameplay experience even more cool. I LOVED each piece, everyone did an amazing job with their talent and creativity. Really I can't decide which I love the most, each piece entered in my heart. Congrats!

From irl side this period is a bit though but games like this are helping me to feel a lot better and even accomplished because of their level of difficulty. I also discovered to love this type of game. I love this collab, one of the best and sadly I couldn't participate because I didn't have an account back when it was announced, made and released T_T
But if in future there will be another collab like that, I would like to participate and contribute to these gems. Thank you all for making this possible and making us use our brains! You all rock and I wish you all the best!

Fun fact: we know that one of the inventor of this type of game is Non Ishida who, in 1987, won a competition in Tokyo by designing grid pictures using skyscraper lights that were turned on or off. This will led her to the idea of a puzzle based around filling in certain squares in a grid. But coincidentally, a professional Japanese puzzler named Tetsuya Nishio invented the same puzzles independently, and published them in another magazine.