Squeakross: Home Squeak Home

Written by Kelly Gray on 7/16/2025 for PC  

Nonogram puzzles are my weakness. No joke, embarrassingly enough, I love getting lost in the grid, trying to crack the first line so I can slowly pick away at the puzzle until I finish the whole thing. I will, quite literally, never turn a nonogram puzzle down. (This is absolutely a challenge. If you have a hard puzzle, send it my way.) Some people crossword, some sudoku, but me? I nonogram.

There's a chance you have no idea what a nonogram puzzle is, and this has been wracking my brain since I started the game. How on earth am I going to explain how nonogram puzzles work? This is going to be more challenging than any of the puzzles I tackled in Squeakross, but here we go...

Nonogram puzzles are blank grids, with numbers on each column and each row. Those numbers indicate the number of filled spaces within that line. The trick is to solve the lines using those number sequences so that it makes sense with the corresponding column/row, thus creating a picture in the grid from the used spaces.

It sounds far more complicated than it is, and there are easier puzzles to get started with. Once you get the hang of it, you develop your own little tricks to make sense of the puzzle. For me? I look for the outside edges and work my way in. Your strategy may be completely different—but this is a single-player puzzle game, so whatever works for you, I will be none the wiser.

So, back to Squeakross. Squeakross is essentially a nonogram puzzle game that's loosely tied to a mouse house. Mousey Housey? A mouse sanctuary. There's no storyline to follow, no plot points. It's simply that. Your mouse begins in a rather boring room. You play nonogram puzzles to unlock furniture for the room, and you build him his space. You also play to unlock stickers to decorate your home screen, and items to customize your mouse.

As you add new items to their space, your mouse can walk around and view the new items, deciding whether or not they liked your choice. This was one area of the game I didn't quite understand. The mouse's reactions were not strong enough for me to know if my interior decorating skills were subpar or superb, but ultimately it didn't matter. I wasn't trying to keep my mouse happy or alive; that is not a game component here. I think if this were to be explored, it may add a bit of intrigue and excitement to the game. If I were trying to keep my mouse alive and happy I'd spend quite a bit more time making sure his home was suitable. A little life bar and happiness bar would go a long way here, and would have better allowed me to understand the "why" on decorating the house.

I believe sometimes with small independent games like this, the focus turns towards creating a game that merely playable, but not really putting the time into building a story or clear objectives. This game, while engaging for a nonogram player, falls victim to just that. Squeakross is so close to being a fun, cozy puzzle game, but it just falls short due to the lack of strategy in developing a game that really hooks a player and provides them with something different.

The concept of building a home for a mouse is cute. I just would like to see it pushed a bit further because, ultimately, I stopped decorating the mouse space and just hammered out puzzle after puzzle. Alas! My five-year-old loved decorating the mouse's space, so I was able to save that part for when we got to play together. Cute mommy-daughter moment, but that shows the divide in the audience that this game could work for, because she's about 10 years shy of being able to understand nonograms.

Something of note is that Squeakross does not introduce the player to nonogram puzzles, but rather throws you in headfirst. This is perfect for me, an experienced nonogram puzzler, but perhaps not for a novice. That being said, there's no punishment for making an error in the game. You can learn on your own and make as many mistakes as you need until you finally crack the puzzle, which is nice, especially playing on a laptop without a mouse (I misclicked a lot). The game does scale as well, opening with some easier puzzles and slowly getting more complicated throughout.

Fun things about Squeakross: I loved the mouse theming of the game, and how it was carried throughout the graphics. Filling my board with cheese instead of a single color was a fun addition. The graphics are simple, but not overly clunky. The functionality of the game was smooth, and didn't take much to load and progress. I was able to hop from one element of the game to another rather seamlessly, and it was easy to navigate where the different portions of the game lived. Again, I'm a nonogram fan, so I also really enjoy solving the puzzles, and Squeakross provided just that.

One final note on the fun things list is that some of the decor items are typical household items, and some are a bit sillier. I loved solving a puzzle and getting a weird decor item. I think it would be fun if they pushed it to unlock even quirkier items, like a Mice Band Poster for the wall, or a telephone booth.

I have far more to say about Squeakross than I expected—this even surprised me! But I hope it was worth the read, and if anything, maybe it will inspire someone to start playing nonogram puzzles!