Overall I enjoyed the game, but there were a few things that made it more stressful than it should have been, and a few missed opportunities that would have made this exceptional.
I played this all the way through on a new iPad Mini. The touch controls are okay for the smaller grids, but once it hit the 15&20 across puzzles, I needed to use the Apple Pencil to be precise enough. Even then, I accidentally hit a square I wasn’t meaning to quite a bit. It’s strange that the puzzles didn’t take up more of the screen - there was plenty of unused space there. There is an option for a D-pad interface, it I found that to be way too slow, considering the game is essentially timed. I would have liked a faster way of switching between fills and X's. The Konami nonogram game really nailed the UI for a touch screen, so hopefully the sequel to this could learn from that.
The RPG elements were an interesting idea, but I wish there was a bit more variety in the powerups. Some sort of weapons and armor system would have been nice to buy more time, and earning stars or XP or something like that by finishing a puzzle within a time limit or with no mistakes would have been cool.
I would have liked to be able to knock monsters out more quickly via combos or powerups or something like that, and then have time at the end to finish up puzzles in my own time or aim for better times without having the monsters attacking me to waste time and ruin my concentration.
Only being able to access the shop a certain points was really annoying. The other option was to backtrack a lot, very slowly with no idea of how far it was to the shop because you couldn’t zoom out on the map. I also didn’t understand the point of the warp points. I never needed to go back and re-solve a puzzle and I couldn’t see which warp was close to a shop in advance, so I just didn’t end up using them .
It was good enough to finish, but I really hope to see a better thought out sequel in the future.