Proverbs (2024)

Hello everyone, it's ya girl Claire and as always, I'm back again to talk about a game literally only I care about. It's Proverbs.

Proberbs is a mosaic puzzle game by Mark Ffrench. It's a sort of "Digital Cross-Stitch", where you slowly assemble the 1559 oil painting "Netherlandish Proverbs" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Sure.

The game plays like a sort of bizarro-version of Minesweeper where bombs don't really exist. Tiles can be turned on or off, with each number indicating how many light squares are around. You don't lose when placing a wrong tile or anything, you just get a warning, and now you have try to figure out where you went wrong.

It's very simple, at times even moreso than actual Minesweeper, but something about it is just really addictive. Any time I glanced at a segment with a clear solution, something took over me and I was immediately sidetracked to add to it, even if it was just one or two tiles. It's like my body just refused to stop building this massive mural.

And the game truly is massive. It's main appeal is that the single puzzle you're trying to solve has over 54,000 pieces, and given how detailed the painting you're recreating is, you just know that it needs each and every one of those squares.

But don't worry! The entire board is divided in over two hundred subsections, making it a lot less overwhelming to get into. Each time you completely fill up a segment with the correct pattern, it will fill up with colors, making your work permanent. Some of these sections are just filler to make the whole thing look prettier, but most of them depict the titular proverbs.

As a painting, Netherlandish Proverbs depicts an absurd scene of dozens of people and animals, all acting out over a hundred different idioms from the Netherlands in a literal maner. All the game does is point out what each of these proverbs mean once you fill their section out.

I know it does not sound like a lot, but it really elevates the experience quite a bit. Like, yeah, completing a logic puzzle and seeing your grid turn into bears is fun. But learning the weird answer to what the bears mean to Dutch people from half a millenium ago? That's something completely different.

But obviously, the game is not without its issues.

Despite how big the actual mosaic is, it still isn't able to reach the same level of fidelity as an oil painting. This can have humorous effects when you see the comparison with the actual artwork at the bottom, but most of the time you end up scratching your head trying to figure out how what you just made relates to the actual painting.

The process of filling up the board is also very disconnected from the final result. Other types of puzzles, for example picross, lend themselves incredibly well to displaying figures in them. Minesweeper, on the other hand, does not work at all for this. Sure, the game is a lot of fun, but there's an incredible disconnect between the process and the result that keeps taking you out of the game.

And yet, I still had a lot of fun playing through Proverbs. It's a unique and relaxing experience that is only elevated by its framing device. The gameplay loop is already fun and addicting, and seeing the mosaic come to life slowly just adds to the satisfaction of the entire game. It might not be the greatest logic puzzle game that exists, but it's still worth trying if you're into this type of stuff.

7/10