Developer Mark Ffrench has carved out something of a unique niche on Steam, regularly releasing fill-a-pix logic puzzle games of enormous scale and surprising depth. Among others in 2024 there was Proverbs, a wall-sized puzzle based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs, and 2024: Mosaic Retrospective, which contained dozens of interlocking images recalling major events from the whole year. Following Mosaic of the Pharaohs earlier this year, we now have the most elaborate entry yet: Mosaic of the Strange—a game that combines the same logic puzzle conceit with a pixelated point-n-click adventure.
Right, describing a logic puzzle is always the most stultifying and joy-destroying process, so please bear with me for a moment before we get back to the fun stuff:
To get everyone on the same page, fill-a-pix is one of the many logic puzzle types to come from puzzle maestros Conceptis, where you fill in a grid based on Minesweeper rules. Each number in the grid indicates the number of cells that should be shaded in the three-by-three grid of which it sits in the center. So, a “6” on the side of a puzzle means all six cells are shaded, while a “0” in the middle means you can eliminate its nine cells from any overlapping clues. The more you play, the more familiar you become with certain patterns, such as the consequences of having a “6” and a “3” in two adjacent cells (you have to shade the three cells to the left of the 6, and eliminate the three to the right of the 3), and so many more besides. RIGHT, OK, WE’RE DONE.
The way Ffrench implements this is by creating enormous mosaics that are segmented into individual puzzles, and rewarding completion of most with little pop-up information. In Proverbs it was details on each of the proverbs depicted in the vast painting. In 2024 it was details of the events of that year. But in Mosaic of the Strange, it’s all rather different. The details that pop up are documents, mostly about conspiratorial mysteries, because in this game you’re playing as FBI agents investigating a murder.
Agents Cullen and Brady are called in after a body is found in gruesome condition, with the circumstances of the man’s death a crazed muddle of mysteries. And rather than solving multiple puzzles on a single wall, here the process of completing the grids is how you’re exploring the items in the rooms. OK, yes, it’s spurious. You’re not actually playing a point-n-click in the sense that you’re actually deducing anything, but with each item solved you gain a document pertaining to a peculiar subject, perhaps cryptids or UFOs or mysterious disappearances from lonely lighthouses, which all add up to evidence to stick up on the pinboard in your office. You also visit the coroner, the murder victim’s apartment, and elsewhere, with a total of 144 puzzles and documents to find.
Various items prompt conversations between the characters, which makes what would otherwise be a more sterile puzzle game feel much more alive and in-depth, and the result is something absorbing both in narrative and in puzzling. Ffrench has nailed the way in which he delivers the challenges, with smart, context-sensitive hints if you want them, and a prompt that will pop up if you’ve gone too horribly wrong without noticing. Also, in this game, you can hugely change the difficulty of the puzzles in a way that I adore.
You can make things so simple that you’re basically painting by numbers, or in increments make it so challenging that every puzzle is a head-scratching ordeal on the scale of Tametsi. I’ve mostly settled on one notch down from the latter, but it’s fun to scale it up to the hardest point and really have to scour for every super-complex pattern of numbers. Even better, you can change that difficulty at any point, midway through solving any grid.
OK, I completely nerded out there, but trust me, you’ve never played anything like Mosaic of the Strange, and you’ll get hours of entertainment for your $12. I can’t wait to see what Ffrench does next, especially if these games continue to evolve in their current direction.
