Roxie’s Puzzle Adventure Review

Roxie’s Puzzle Adventure is a terrific universal puzzle adventure app for all ages, adapting the richly detailed illustrations of Roxie Munro’s previous puzzle app, Roxie’s a-MAZE-ing Vacation Adventure, into a jigsaw puzzle that players of all abilities will enjoy. This app consists of a colorful, stylized, and magnificently drawn landscape that is then broken up into 16 different smaller puzzles. I appreciate how up to five players use this app and their game will be saved independently, and how players can choose to break these individual puzzles into a number of puzzle pieces ranging from six chunky pieces to 260 small pieces on the iPad and 130 pieces on the iPhone, giving young children as well as seasoned adults a chance to enjoy this app equally.

I admire the gameplay of this puzzle app, complete with an audible click and mild “grab” of the puzzle piece when placed in the correct area of the puzzle creating a satisfying experience that one may take for granted but I would certainly miss as I do when using other puzzle apps without this feature. Do note that one can choose to turn on the need for rotating the puzzle pieces to add another element of difficulty as well as realism to this game play.

The pieces themselves also include shading around the edges that makes them look like true puzzle pieces, creating an experience as close to working on a puzzle in real life as one can achieve in an application, with a few helpful functions that would not be available outside the digital experience. Options include a button that when tapped will isolate the corner and edge pieces - a great help when working on puzzles with many pieces. A hint button is also included, allowing one to take a peek at the completed puzzle - very nice for children as they begin to work up to smaller, more numerous pieces. I also appreciate being able pinch or spread one's fingers to shrink or enlarge the view of this puzzle, a thoughtfully intuitive feature I find myself using as I work on these sections.

I have really enjoyed looking closely at all the wonderful map-like details seen within these puzzles - a landscape I equally enjoyed in this app's first incarnation from Roxie’s a-MAZE-ing Vacation Adventure. It is a real treat to manage the difficulty of these puzzles, giving all who start this app a chance to finish as I have not had the time to fully complete this first app the way I wanted to. I think Roxie’s Puzzle Adventure would be a superb app for puzzle lovers to travel with, as large jigsaw puzzles do not pack well and can’t be spread out in the back seat of a car or during the layover in an airport.