Mosaic of the Strange Combines Picross With The X-Files For A Surprisingly Chill Mystery Game

There are few things less cozy than a murder investigation, especially one that involves bizarre rituals and seemingly supernatural circumstances. But add nice, relaxing puzzles to the mix, and suddenly you’ve got a game that’s great to chill out to, despite mostly taking place at a crime scene. Released in mid-December, Mosaic of the Strange combines Minesweeper-inspired puzzles with a story straight out of The X-Files, making for one of the most satisfying genre mashups of the year.

Things start off grim in Mosaic of the Strange. A body is found in a locked firewatch tower with unexplainable injuries and two federal agents are sent to investigate. The case sends them across the town of Pinehaven to consult scientists, psychics, and conspiracy theories in search of some explanation for what happened there. Along the way, they pull in stories of cryptids and supernatural occurrences from history to form a picture of what actually happened to the victim.

In the midst of all that are the puzzles. Mosaic of the Strange comes from developer Mark Ffrench, who’s been putting out a series of stellar puzzle games revolving around one big idea for the past couple of years. Starting with Mega Mosaic, Mark Ffrench has made a series of “mosaic” games, which combine elements of the logic puzzles Minesweeper and Picross. In each mosaic game, you’re presented with a massive game board grid divided into smaller sections. Throughout the grid are numbered tiles telling you which squares to fill in. Each number tells you how many adjacent squares should be colored in, while the rest should be marked blank. Finishing a puzzle with these Minesweeper-like rules results in a picture like you’d get from completing a Picross level, just at a much larger scale.

Like any good Picross game, Mosaic of the Strange is oddly relaxing for just how tough its deductions can be. Its puzzles can only be solved with careful logic, which is at first tricky to wrap your head around. Since every number only tells you the number of colored squares around it, and not their locations, it’s only by combining multiple hints at once that you can figure the puzzle out. Even getting started can be both perplexing and soothing. Hunting across the entire board for a spot where you can begin solving — say, a nine indicating that every surrounding square should be filled in, or a four shoved in the corner with only four squares touching it — feels like searching for the single thread that will unravel an entire sweater if you pull it. And once you find your starting place, working your way through the entirety of a grid clue by clue is extremely satisfying.

Mosaic of the Strange’s gigantic Picross board is divided into 144 sections, each of which forms its own picture when complete. Finishing a section also rewards you with a real-life case file on a different paranormal mystery, from the Dyatlov Pass incident to the Loch Ness monster. The often grisly, always strange cases that get uncovered feel like just as much of a motivation to finish the game as the puzzles and story it contains, offering a novel way to learn about some of the strangest mysteries ever investigated.

Mosaic of the Strange is a game full of tiny epiphanies. Get far enough into any puzzle, past the point where you’ve exhausted the obvious clues, and you’ll inevitably end up getting stuck now and then. The logic of its puzzles becomes second-nature after a while, and you’ll eventually learn to decipher some clues just with a quick scan. But not every clue is quite so obvious, and working out how the intersecting rules of each grid come together is just as challenging as it is relaxing. With a catchy soundtrack and a fun supernatural mystery to unwind on top, Mosaic of the Strange is a great puzzle game for when you want to relax a bit but still keep your brain working overtime.

Mosaic of the Strange is available now on PC.