This chill picross logic game about very prescriptive camping was a hit on Switch, and now it's coming to PC

I remember revealing at some point that my most-played game is actually a free-to-play picross game (picross, also called nonograms sometimes, being the logic puzzle game where you colour in squares on a grid to reveal a larger picture). You can imagine my intrigue when I saw that Tents And Trees, a picross-ish puzzle game previously on Switch and phones, is coming to PC on April 24th. That's a couple of months away, but you can play the short demo on Steam now to get a taste. It's slick and clean, and I like it!

The premise is simple. You're given a small grid map with some trees on it. Each tree must have a tent in one of the 8 squares around it, but tents can't be next to each other. All other squares are grass. It's a logic puzzle, with clues given by the placement of trees, and by numbers along the X and Y axis of the grid, indicating how many tents are in that row. So if the number is zero, you can mark all the squares as grass. I like to imagine the rules were instituted by an extremely strict campground manager who is a law unto himself, but also unto everyone else.

The controls are just as simple - right click for grass, left click for tent, since those are the only two things you really need to do - and although the demo levels are pretty easy (beat my recorded Steam time playing the demo of 3 minutes), this sort of simplicity suggests that it could get extremely difficult. Either that or the game can just keep generating new levels forever, and either way I'm alright with it. It scored in the 90s on Metacritic - although these days I try to live my life free of the constraints of score aggregators. If I paid attention to them, I would never have seen The Expendables, and then where would we be? Not watching The Beekeeper this week, that's where.

To get back on track, since films starring Jason Statham provide a distinctly different experience to Tents And Trees, my one concern is that these sorts of games do tend to just sort of fit better on portable devices, hence Switch and mobile. Even a Steamdeck seems a bit heavy to carry around to play this game on. Still, take a loot at Tents And Trees if you like slick puzzle games. It's out on April 24th.