This is how Picross: Lord of the Nazarick should have played: Plenty of nonograms to play with some very, very light RPG seasoning sprinkled on. These are good puzzles, too, though quite a bit less challenging than a typical Picross game.

I do have a few small complaints:

• The RPG mechanics never feel essential. I'd love to see Battleship-like mechanics layered on top of the typical nonogram puzzle or something like that.
• The UI isn't as polished as a Jupiter game. Hints gray out a little earlier than I would expect, and there's no ability to soft mark a square for future reference.
• I bought this for Switch when it was 50% off. $9.99 feels a bit overpriced compared to what you get in a Picross S game for the same price.

A good introduction to Picross games when it goes on sale.

PictoQuest attempts a fusion of traditional Nonogram puzzles (à la Picross) and RPG elements. For me, they were not successful. I finished pretty much all puzzles before the RPG mechanics started to matter.

Puzzles are framed as fights. Enemy monsters slowly charge up an attack meter, and once full, they attack and drain your health bar. You can use items during puzzles to make things easier. For example, you could use a healing item.
There are more intricacies to this, but none of that matters when you are good enough at puzzle solving. In that case, the RPG mechanics remain purely an annoying distraction.

The puzzles themselves are also rather dull. The difficulty only increases by giving you bigger puzzles. Except those aren’t more challenging, they just take longer to solve.

The only exception is the occasional challenge puzzle with some goal for you to fulfil. Common challenges are beating it on a tight timer or not making mistakes. But they were too few and far between to save the experience for me.

I was looking for a game that added some interesting twists to the stale Nonogram formula. But I didn’t get any of that from this game.