This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It’s a short week this week (if you are in the states and celebrating Thanksgiving), so we are going to have a quick review. Today we are going to review the puzzle game "Stitch". So, let’s avoid the small talk and that racist uncle in the corner and get to the good stuff.

Stitch is a puzzle game that is part jigsaw puzzle, and part picross. While there is no time limit and really no high score, your objective is to go grid by grid filling out little pieces of the puzzle, until you have made the pattern, or design of the entire puzzle. I find the way this game works a little difficult to describe but relatively easy to play, so bear with me here. In Stitch the pattern you are looking to make is divided into grids of different sizes and shapes. Each grid is labeled with an assortment of numbers on them that tell you different sizes of stitched colors that will fill that grid. (This will be easier with pictures) So, if you have a grid that is a 9x9 square you might have the numbers: 4, 3, and 2. You now have to fit those pieces into that grid, the catch is that the numbered squares have to include the piece that you are putting down. So in our example above a 9x9 can be filled with a 2x2 square in the bottom corner (4), a 3x1 piece (3) and a 1x2 piece (2) to completely fill in that 9x9, however that ‘3’ on the board has to be included as part of the 3 piece. Again this all will make sense in like 2 seconds of video or staring at one of the pictures in my review. The numbers also dictate what color the stitch design is going to be, so if you know what kind of pattern you are making, you can use that as a kind of helpful guide. You do this work over and over completely all the grids in the pattern, until you complete the picture you set out to make.

See Stitch has 100s (if you count the daily challenges, approximately 550 puzzles) of puzzles, and I will say that I did not complete every single one, but we will get to that in a little bit. Unlike other puzzle games where you might have to play levels in a certain order, making sure you aren’t tackling difficult puzzles before easy ones, in Stitch you are kinda free to pick whatever design tickles your fancy. Sure you could go with the XS heart that might only take you 10 minutes to complete or you could go with the “Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr” stitch that will take you multiple hours. Luckily for you, you can save at any point during your puzzling adventure so you can start a long one and not have to finish it in one sitting. There are also daily challenges that are only a single grid length, that if you do enough of, will unlock the hardest puzzles. There is also "objectives" that you can do that will increase your rank that also unlocks a separate set of puzzles. Objectives such as "complete 2 small puzzles," or "Stitch 1000 squares." As far as I know the rank nor daily challenges impacting anything else in the game.

It has been a little bit since I finished a puzzle (I’m writing this from the future), but while you do get scored based on how large the puzzle is, and whether or not you used any hints, or if it was your first time doing this puzzle, I don’t think there are really a lot of other score differentials that you can get during this game. Presumably if I beat a puzzle on the first go around, without using hints, I am going to get the maximum score, whether it takes me 10 minutes or 10 hours to complete. I hope I am wrong, (I actually don’t really care), but it means that presumably one of the puzzle game draws of; trying to get a better score, has a finite breaking point. If you choose to not use hints at all, it should mean you will get a maximum score on every puzzle the first time you play it.

Here is where I am going to segway into my biggest issue with Stitch, the puzzles are too long. In stitch the puzzles are categorized from XS to XXXL (I think, maybe one less X). XS puzzles can be beaten in 20 minutes or less, but XXXL puzzles can take you more than 2 hours to complete (some took me probably closer to 4-5 hours to complete). In a game with 100s of puzzles, that choice should be seen as a great benefit, but I am here to tell you that there are far more of the larger puzzles than the smaller puzzles and it is not even close to a 50-50 split on those. So while you might enjoy a grand total of 15-20 puzzles that will take you less than an hour to complete, you now have100 more puzzles that are going to be marathons. With the ability to save anytime this might not seem like a big deal. You could play this game in 20 minute increments until your time on this planet is over, but that just means that you will finish a single puzzle every other week (for the XXL ones). Add to that the harder puzzles to complete also have less fun designs and colors, so I hope you enjoy grid after grid of just the color beige, because that is going to happen. All of this could be flipped to a benefit if I enjoyed my time with the game more. (OMG there are 100s of hours of puzzles to play and each one fills up my day... YAY!), but i'm a jaded old man, and that hour count to complete some of these puzzles was too daunting.

It leaves me to ask who this game is for, and while I think I know the answer, I also don’t think it is a huge demographic. We have a puzzle game that doesn’t have much of a score component, so you aren’t chasing leaderboards or trying to improve upon your own abilities ala Tetris. We have a game that doesn’t really have a speed component to it, as some puzzles are literally going to take you days to complete (I can’t stress that enough), and you have a game that difficulty wise may not be very challenging, but this is going to vary widely. With its content I think this is a game that is designed to be a relaxing puzzle game that you play daily for a long time. One of the hardest puzzles requires you to complete 365 of the daily puzzles just to unlock it, so the thought is that this game at least wants you to play it for an entire year’s worth of time, not necessarily consecutively, but still for the same amount of time. I know, I know, that puzzle is only meant to be unlocked by the most hardcore Stitch fans, and the company did not make the game with the thought that even 40% of people would unlock that puzzle, but it is a crazy assumption and time commitment to ask of your players. Having never really played it, Stitch makes me think that it would be better suited as a Candy Crush kind of game. A little mobile puzzler that people can play in super small doses while they go about their everyday life and all of those waiting periods. While the Switch is portable, I just don't see it fitting in that same niche as a game someone is committing to playing daily to work on the puzzles.

Is this game relaxing? That is perhaps the biggest question. I personally found this a very boring puzzle game to play. I would find myself falling asleep while playing it, and one could argue that by definition it “relaxed” me enough to make me sleepy. I would continue a previous save where I was working on an XXL puzzle, play 10-15 minutes and complete a few grids, and then have to save it and quit in order to wake myself up by moving my body or playing something more interesting. For the record I do not get the same feeling when I play Picross or work on jigsaw puzzles, but Stitch wanted to knock me out.

I started playing this, hoping it would fill in a spot of a puzzle game I could play during down time, or when the TV’s were taken by the boys. When I decided that I would make this one of the games I write about, I forced myself to buckle down and put real time into this game. I finished about half of the puzzles I had access to, including some of the unlockable puzzles for doing daily challenges, but I had to stop, because it was driving me mad trying to make sure I played it every day.

Stitch isn’t necessarily a bad game, and I think it probably did what it was trying to accomplish, however it just didn’t work for me. Maybe I am not the target audience, but this game felt like I was playing it just to go through the motions, or to waste time that I don’t have. I rarely got enjoyment out of completing a puzzle, because you know what it’s going to look like before you start, and lo and behold it looks like that when you finish it. I truly think that if each puzzle was beatable within lets say 2 hours, I would have had a lot more fun with the game. I could have picked a puzzle that fit the time I had to play the game and see it through to completion, but starting a puzzle that is going to take 5 hours and knowing I might not beat until next week, didn’t motivate me the same way. At least with a jigsaw puzzle on your kitchen table it doesn’t feel like a time commitment the same way this one does.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: Like I said, I don't think this is a bad game, it just didn't click for me. I was excited when I saw it pop into the Nintendo partner direct, and showed my wife because it trailered well, and looked like something we would enjoy. However, outside of 10-15 smaller puzzles, I was disappointed with the huge time commitment most puzzles took and couldn't keep up a daily habit of playing this game to unlock everything. I have it ranked as the 180th Greatest Game of all time. This is currently out of 199 games, who knows maybe the next 200 games I play are all lower than this, and it looks great in comparison.

What's it Between: Stitch sits between Extreme Exorcism (179th) and NBA Inside Drive 2002 (181st). Two games that have very little in common with this game.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening