Developer Thoughts
We’re really excited here at Anawiki for the release of Arizona Rose and the Pirates’ Riddles, in which you get to take on the role of Arizona Rose, an antique collector who becomes immersed in a life of adventure and exploration after finding a set of treasure maps, written in a secret code. She needs your help to crack that code, as she sails exotic seas, tracking down an ancient pirate treasure.
Arizona Rose and the Pirates’ Riddles breaks new ground in the picross genre with its dramatic storyline and the addition of hidden object scenes and additional mini-games, featuring a couple of additional types of spatial puzzles to tease your brain. Whether you’re a veteran picross solver or a newcomer to this type of puzzle, we’re sure you’ll be wowed by this new direction we’ve taken with the genre.
For those unfamiliar with it, picross (short for “picture crossword”) is a kind of number puzzle sure appeal to fans of Sudoku and other logic games. You’ve got an empty grid to start with, whose rows and columns are marked with numbers; these numbers correspond to sets of filled boxes somewhere within that row or column. When you’ve solved the puzzle, the filled boxes will form an image; another clue on Arizona’s quest for treasure!
We’ve put together over 200 levels of challenging picross action for you, and wrapped it the high adventure and mystery that fans have come to expect from our games. While working on this game, we really fell in love with Arizona as a protagonist, and we think players will too. Her journey from humble collector to world-famous treasure hunter makes for a compelling story, which is of course filled with pirates, secret caves, jungles and sunken ships.
The game’s difficulty curve is also just about perfect. We’ve a great tutorial and really easy introductory levels for newcomers to picross, while veteran players can start in hard mode to skip the tutorial and the easy stuff. But whether you’re a newbie or an expert, the grids get bigger and the puzzles get more challenging in a steady way, so by the end of the game’s 200 levels, you’ll be taking on giant 20×20 or even 25×25 grids with confidence.
As you can probably tell, we really love picross here at Anawiki; we had a blast making the game, and are proud of the way it revolutionizes picross. We hope it’ll succeed in introducing a whole new crowd of fans to this great style of puzzle, and give picross experts something new to be excited about. As with all our games, Arizona and the Pirates’ Riddles also offers great value for our customers. There are a lot of hours of game play here, great art and awesome puzzles. And, of course, our favorite heroine to date.
We hope you’ll give it a try and tell us what you think! Play now.