Hydroneer - Thoughts

Every so often I run up against a game I can't wrap my brain around. Not in the sense that I fail to understand its mechanics or can't complete it, but that I don't really grasp its widespread appeal. Or maybe I get its theoretical appeal, but find it so severely wanting that I convince myself there must be more to the experience. There are a couple of older titles that I struggle with (Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Red Dead Redemption), but I haven't felt this way about a modern game (sans Mass Attack) for a good while now.

 

That is, until I played Hydroneer—an automation sandbox game that's as fulfilling as eating several sleeves of saltines in a row.

 

Despite the aquatic moniker, Hydroneer is as dry as a game could be. You're plopped down onto an island with a lantern, shovel, and a big patch of land to excavate... and that's all the guidance you get. If you nose around a bit you'll find several stores, a merchant to sell to, and a few quests that seem to point you in the right direction, but they're all red herrings. What you have to do is start sifting through the dirt, because you're going to need a good chunk of money in order to start automating.

 

Interacting with the game at any level will immediately reveal its make-or-break gimmick: no inventory. You're only allowed to pick up and hold one thing at a time, which will either sound like an absolute nightmare or an inviting challenge. I chose to take it as the latter and gradually began filling a bucket with enough ore to buy the rest of the refinement line. This however, was a misstep—smelting ingots and forging jewelry demanded too much manual labor for the scant increase in earnings they provided (25%?!). I had forgotten the #1 rule for any factory game: if you can make it, automate it.

 

So off I went, money in hand (since you don't have pockets) to go purchase some machines. I set up a driller, connected it to a water pipeline for power, and watched as it spat endless chunks of dirt onto the ground. After smacking my forehead in shame I went back to the store to grab a harvester so I could transform those useless brown chunks into ore. A couple of awkwardly dug holes later and I was able to place a bucket below the harvester, and then...

 

... I was done.

 

I don't mean that I was done with the game, but the automation portion was effectively solved. You see, Hydroneer doesn't let you purchase more drillers or harvesters unless you go make your own at a mountain forge all the way across the map, starting at a ludicrous price of 300 units of metal ore—roughly $3700 worth of product. Mind you, the most expensive patch of land in the game is only $7200, and very few items (vehicles) breach the 1k mark. So rather than spending hours selling goods to double my output, I dug down as low as I could go in order to get better quality ore out of my lone driller. Then after doing some exploring and ruminating, I sold all my ore, bought all the plots of land on the island, and then finally called it quits for good.

 

See, a weird thing about Hydroneer that I didn't know going in is that it's a "sandbox" game in the literal sense. You decide how much to industrialize this humble patch o' dirt; there are no objectives, no enemies, no meters to manage, or deadlines to hit. I guess you could try and complete the quests leading up to the king, but considering the second quest requires five thousand units of metal ore, it feels less like a guideline and more like an absurd postgame target. There is more to do in Hydroneer than mining—there's farming, fishing, house building, and even logic circuits of all things—but the only thought I had regarding those was "... why?"

 

I don't mean to be smarmy; I was there for Minecraft's 2011 Alpha, I know how cool it is to just goof around making things in a digital world. But what separates Hydroneer from its kin is its dreaded "no inventory" limitation. That binding makes any creative endeavor an absolute headache to navigate around, like playing an MMORPG at walking speed or a MOBA on a trackpad. I don't want to build a house or cultivate crops in a game where the purported goal is to use automation to bypass your handicap. And when the automation conundrum can be effectively solved in the first few hours (thanks to every mineral type being available in the starting plot), what is there left to do but twiddle your thumbs and make up insufferable goals on your lonesome?

 

Perhaps I'm just the wrong audience for Hydroneer. But then it begs the question: who is the game for? People that only buy one game off Steam a year? Folks unbothered by the sunk-cost fallacy? Satisfactory and Valheim are brilliant alternatives that offer the same kind of "rags to riches" gameplay with stringent (but smart!) limitations. Hell, Minecraft still stands tall in its field, packed with unrivaled potential for stunning architecture and complex logic doohickeys! I feel a tad annoyed to have bought into Hydroneer's hype, its agonizingly-slow pace projected as "part of the charm" rather than the obnoxious time-sink it is. Hydroneer is a game that doesn't fill a niche beyond "something to play while bored", to which the cures are already vast and innumerable.

Picross e Series - Thoughts

I'm not sure there are many people out there that have fully finished Picross e 1-9. Before the 3DS shop closure I purchased them on sale on a whim, having enjoyed Mario's Picross and Picross DS plenty but not really sure I'd get around to playing the series, let alone more than one entry. But it turns out there's a lot of opportunities throughout the day where rather than mindlessly scrolling through your phone you can do a puzzle or two... or a dozen, which seemed to be around my average. Right around the point I got halfway through the series I made it my mission to get through them all, and by the start of December 2025 I was done. Over the course of 3.42 years and 354 sessions I completed 2147 puzzles (22 of which were Micross sets [multiple puzzles]), spending 264 hours total. And what do I think about Picross as a whole?

 

I dunno—it's fun.

 

 

Trying to write an entry about Picross is like writing about Sudoku: what can you really say? It's a puzzle game where you have to mark pips on a board using numbers on the X and Y axes as your guide, and it's a pretty simple—but effective—mental exercise. All entries in the series start with 5x5 boards but gradually increase to 10x10 and 15x15, and starting from e4 you get super-wide 20x15 puzzles. For novice players you can get highlighted hints on where to start looking for pips to mark, and/or a random row & column pre-marked to serve as a springboard. You can also let the game correct you when you make a mistake at the cost of a time penalty, with your total time being the only kind of "scoring" the game has.

 

Early on I decided to turn all of those assist modes off, only keeping the gray-out indicator for when a row/column's pips have been completed. I tried playing without it for a micross puzzle, but felt there was too much number keeping busywork; you basically have to re-check your work every time you return to work on a row or column. It might be a less "authentic" way to play, but if it meant not having to re-count yet another "1 1 1 1 1" row, I'll gladly take it.

 

While the e series will give you more standard picross puzzles than you can shake a stick at, you'll also get micross puzzles starting in e2 and mega picross starting in e3. Micross has you solving 30+ 10x10 puzzles that come together to form a historical painting, and mega picross features "mega" numbers that extend over two lines. Of the two I vastly prefer mega picross; micross is basically a big time waster, as 50% of its puzzles are easily solved and those that aren't are just your typical 10x10 fare. Mega picross on the other hand is a delectable challenge, requiring a different mindset and new skills to deduce its hardest challenges. At first I didn't care for it compared to your regular nonogram challenge, but slowly I found it to be on par—if not better—due to the extra challenge it adds. The only downside is having to math out mega numbers larger than 12, as it can be very tedious work counting all the possibilities (16, 17, 18—wait, can a pip go there? Wait, what number was I at? 17?)

 

 

 

Ah, but I've saved the best feature to talk about for last: starting in e7, the player can use a second marker on the board! This is a massive improvement to the series, as you no longer have to use Xs while doing theoretical counts, saving you from any potential slip-ups. It's about as fundamental of a feature as being able to list possible numbers within a square in Sudoku, greatly speeding up your deductions thanks to how easy it is to plop pink squares down and then erase them in a single swipe. I've been playing the Twilight Princess Picross tie-in while writing this, and it has made me miss the feature dearly; more than once I've ruined a puzzle due to a rogue X that I forgot to delete while counting.

 

Besides those features, there's nothing that really separates one e title from another. The latter half of the series (from e6 onward) doubles the amount of available puzzles (from 150 to 300), but there's no distinctive or qualitative differences between the entries. Art and music is consistently adequate across the franchise and all games share similar difficulty curves. Namely, that the first 50 puzzles are a breeze but there are always ten or twenty sprinkled throughout that require an advanced level of skill to complete without guessing. Out of the 2000+ puzzles I played, only 43 puzzles took me over 20 minutes, and they weren't centralized to one particular game or era (though e8 was definitively my longest game). Because of this, there isn't really one game in particular that I recommend; I would say to grab e6/7/8 just for the addition of the second marker tool, but in Picross S+ every one of the e games gets that feature, so there's no wrong choice.

 

 

Out of all the simple logic games I've played, I think Picross will always remain my favorite. Part of it is a smidge of Nintendo brainwashing—I was a Nintendo kid until college after all—but another part is that I find it irresistibly charming. The sleek visuals, the pleasant tunes, the delightful sound effect each button emits, and the perfect amount of math involved keep me returning to the series again and again. Plus there's the fun little challenge where after a completion, you try and guess the picture you've made before the game tells you what it is 3 seconds later. Picross will never win any significant accolades from basically anybody, but it remains a treat worth appreciating, like the oft-forgotten after-dinner mint. Quaint and understated, but always entertaining and warmly welcomed.

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Images obtained from:  ign.com, rawg.io,