Squeakross: Home Squeak Home Review

What an amazing game, the perfect game for newcomers as well as for veterans. It has so many ways to welcome you into the world of Picross/Nonogram games and it has 650 puzzles! No missable achievements.

Note: I wrote this review earlier than I normally would. This is for two reasons:
1. I couldn’t wait to tell you guys how amazing this game is. If you ever wanted to learn how Picross/Nonogram puzzles work, this is the game for you!
2. I would love to take my sweet time to complete all 650 puzzles without feeling I have to rush through them to write a review. As I’m enjoying it too much.

Approximate time to 100%: This depends on how good you are at this type of puzzle. I would guess I need 50 to 60 hours to complete this game as a veteran of Picross games.
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can use the settings to help you out and even use the hint system to get a hint or check for errors. There are even achievements for using those systems.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Squeakross: Home Squeak Home blew me away in so many ways, first of all, how in-depth the systems are. I know most Picross/Nonogram games have settings to tell you about mistakes, or give you slight hints when you complete sections, but this game is on another level. Second, because of this game’s size, it has 650 puzzles. And all puzzles unlock furniture for your house or accessories for your rodent.

To go more in-depth on that hint system and why this game is so newbie-friendly: Squeakross: Home Squeak Home offers the basic settings in the settings menu of automatically finish a row if you colored all the needed blocks, or cross the row off at the start of a puzzle when it shouldn’t have any blocks. It also offers to always have sections of 5 by 5 (even with a high contrast option to make it more clear, and can I quickly mention it even comes with a dark mode!) But outside of the relatively standard options, it offers so much more. There is a hint system where the numbers have a different outline or color when finished, or when you should be able to deduce some blocks around that section. And it makes very clear that a game of Picross/Nonogram never includes guesses, as that can screw up the whole puzzles (however, it offers the option to check for errors through your rodents help menu). And what impressed me the most, if you block the right section of (for example, a row with 2,2,2 and you have 2 blocks together, so you put a cross left and right, and that specific section can really only be one section, it will show that in the numbers on the side. However, it will not do that if it can still be any of the three sections. I’m used to games not doing this at all or doing it always, so you have information you can’t usually have… this was so refreshing (to be fair, I even poked the dev first that something strange was going on, thinking it was a bug 😮 )

Next to all the puzzles and the many helpful features they added, the devs have also gone wild with every other aspect of this awesome game. The amount of customization you can do in your home, the amount of furniture and even how your rodent interact with all this furniture, the mailbox system, and how many mails you get but can sort them in the type of mails (you even get spam mails :P) and I love to see that they even included cute rodent pictures. If you follow them on social media, you know they post them occasionally, but in Squeakross: Home Squeak Home, you’ll be treated to a lot more of them. I love that the developers found a way to show their passion in every single way! And if all of this isn’t enough… You also get a slew of options for customizing your own rodent.

None of the achievements in Squeakross: Home Squeak Home are missable. Most of them are for completing the puzzles or using the hint system. However, there are also many achievements for customizing your house and rodent in a specific way. There are also achievements for interactions with your rodent. For example, to sit on different furniture or squeak 100 times.

I give Squeakross: Home Squeak Home 5 out of 5 stars. I’m impressed and blown away, and I would never have thought that was possible in a Picross game!

This review for Squeakross: Home Squeak Home was written on 7 June 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 57 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.