Bursting at the Seams

To say that I've "had my share" of jigsaw puzzle games would be the understatement of the century. Did you read the title of this paragraph? "Bursting at the seams" is a pretty darn well accurate description of how I feel about the subject. So many games flood the PC market everyday, that you're bound to see a lot of the same things over and over again. Well, that also applies to jigsaw games. They're a surprisingly popular market, what with people ditching their old cardboard relics for digitized puzzles on the computer. That being the case, everyone is looking to cash in. For a puzzle game to really grab my attention nowadays, it has to offer something fresh, something inventive, something new. Or, as this case may be, something very,very old. Jigsaw Retro has done the impossible and caused me to embrace another one of these puzzlers, rather than run from it screaming! Now that is saying something!

A Puzzling Time

Most, if not all of the events depicted here took place well before my time. I was born in the 80's, so some of the stuff found in these fifty jigasw puzzles is pretty ancient to me. So while the nostalgic factor might be lost on me, it doesn't do much in terms of fading my interest. The time period these pictures represent fascinates me, from the beauty found in black and white photos, to the terrible haircuts and hideous fashions that people adorned themselves with. Striped swimming trunks that look like boxers? What were you thinking?

That being said, I can only imagine that folks older themselves would get even more out of these photos. Nostalgia is a great feeling and something that enhances an experience ten fold. I can definitely appreciate that these are real people in these photos from a real time period. It's a little overwhelming, in a way. It adds a certain level of depth that you would never expect from a game about jigsaw puzzles.

From One Era to Another

The funny thing about this game having a "retro" theme is that the theme is the only thing retro about it. What I'm trying to say is this isn't your daddy's jigsaw puzzle! While it keeps all the fun of a classic jigsaw, it adds new and wonderful customizations that are only possible due to it's PC game format. You can customize the difficulty to an insane degree in a variety of ways.

First off, you can decide to complete a puzzle of just a few pieces (the lowest being four) or you can go for a personal record and ramp that number up into the high hundreds - almost to a thousand. It's not like you only have a few choices, either. You simply adjust a slider to your liking, giving you dozens of possibilities.

You can change the skew - which distorts the shape - from none to medium to high, each making the pieces a little less perfect than before. It seems like a minor change, but it can actually impact the challenge of a puzzle quite a bit. You can also choose between the classic jigsaw shape for the pieces or a simple square.

Finally, you can turn piece rotation on or off, which can arguably have the biggest effect on difficulty. Only serious jigsaw junkies should turn the rotation feature on.

Whether you're in it for the nostalgia or the puzzle-piecing goodness, there's a lot to like here.