Thank you Lightwood Games for sending us this title to review!

Last year we reviewed Phil’s Epic Fill-a-Pix on the 3DS. Since then, twenty more puzzles have been added to the base game and a $3.99 USA Road Trip DLC has been released. Switch and Vita owners can now join in on the puzzle solving fun. In this game you’ll need to help Phil develop one hundred and twenty of his pictures taken from around the world. The pictures range in size and complexity and some of them are up to one hundred squares wide. Some of the pixel art photos are truly stunning in the end. The problem is that it takes a lot of time and patience to see them come to fruition. One of the puzzles took me an hour and a half to complete! Thankfully, you can close out and resume where you left off if needed.

Fill-a-Pix is a combination of Picross and Minesweeper. On the puzzle board, you’ll see lots of numbers and they represent the total squares in a nine block radius that must be shaded in. For example, if you see a zero, you can shade it along with all of the surrounding squares in gray. On the flip side, a number nine will need a majority of the blocks filled in with black. Since these photos are monochrome, you will only need to color them black or gray.

You can fill in the blocks square by square, or you can switch to a wider radius mode which will auto fill in sections if the majority is already solved. While the wider radius is supposed to save time, I didn’t find it very helpful and stuck with the single cursor mode.

Like many puzzles, there is a chance of messing up. Thankfully, the nearby numbers will turn red if a box is shaded incorrectly. You can also do an error check at any time and it will let you know how many mistakes there are and give you the option to automatically fix them if desired. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I accidentally “fixed” many of the puzzles and lost out on the chance of getting a golden border around the completed picture as a result.

There’s plenty of variety in puzzle types and sizes. The locations range from Africa, Australia, China, Egypt, England, France, Italy, Japan, Las Vegas, Mexico, and Russia. A couple of the pictures have gambling and alcohol references but this game is still suitable for puzzle lovers of all ages.

The background music is calming and the sound effects are serviceable. If you don’t like either, they can be disabled in the options menu. The visuals are good and some of the pictures look really well done while others are merely okay. I like the art style for Phil.

In the end, this is a good game for puzzle lovers. It’s a decent way to kill time, but there are more entertaining games for $7.99. There are plenty of puzzle books available at the dollar store but they are one time use. When it comes to replayability in Phil’s Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure, you can try to re-do a picture quicker than you did before. Puzzle books won’t keep track of your completion time for you.