Pure Crosswords review for Nintendo Switch

The developers of Pure Crosswords are nothing if not confident in their own abilities. The game?s full title on the eShop is actually ?Pure Crosswords – the best Crossword Puzzle Word Game ever!” While I haven?t played that many crossword puzzle video games, given that the last two games I reviewed from the same developer were bland and forgettable, I was a little skeptical.

However, credit where credit is due: Pure Crosswords is a very good take on the genre. I mean, it doesn?t reinvent what people have been doing with pencil and paper for the last 150 years, but it also doesn?t need to do that. It just needs to approximate the pencil and paper experience on a Switch screen, and it does just that.

What?s more, it does so with a pretty clean interface. You have the crossword on the top half of the screen and the keyboard on the bottom, and even with all that on the screen at once it still manages to present it in a way that?s easy to read. Couple that with the fact the game boasts of 2,250 puzzles (750 each for easy, medium and hard difficulty levels), and a way to track your stats across all of the puzzles, and you can see why the developers were so high on what they?d created.

To be sure, I have a few quibbles. The keyboard buttons aren?t always the easiest to press, which means that you?ll occasionally get one letter popping up in place of another. And some of the clues can be a little tough or obscure ? though at worst, we?re talking New York Times Thursday Crossword-level challenging, not Sunday-level.

In any case, if those are my complaints, that must mean Pure Crosswords is doing something right. I still don?t know if I?d call in the best Crossword Puzzle Word Game ever, but I?d still say it?s a pretty fun take on the genre if you?re a fan.

the binary family provided us with a Pure Crosswords Switch code for review purposes.