Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is one part pet simulator, one part puzzle game. After creating your own personal rodent, giving it a dash of colour and a personality to match, you set about populating its initially modest home with a wide variety of furniture and decorum. You unlock these by completing nonogram puzzles, or Squeakross puzzles, in which a sudoku-esque grid forms a picture as it’s filled in.. It’s an adorable romp that has plenty of content to keep you playing for a long time, but is best enjoyed in shorter bursts.
As a puzzle game, Squeakross is fantastic. Controls are snappy and intuitive and I greatly appreciate the wide variety of tweaks and options available to the player. You can change how the game displays clues to either make the game more challenging, or have an easier time, and at any point can call on your rat to offer you a hint. I did find the difficulty of the puzzles fairly inconsistent, with some later puzzles being surprisingly easy compared to earlier puzzles, but things overall were fairly breezy.
I’m much more mixed on the decoration side of the game. Solving puzzles to earn furniture is fine, but the process of decorating your house feels fairly clunky and just doesn’t offer a lot. There’s very minimal interactivity available with the variety of furniture – you can have your rat react to whatever you’ve placed, but these reactions are limited to simple animations that, as far as I can tell, are completely random. While you can assign a personality to your rat during character creation, I never really felt like that personality actually shone through.
That extends to the furniture itself. There’s a variety of different sets available that go beyond the basic wooden tables and chairs, with the space-themed galaxy set a personal favourite. Despite that, I felt like my rat’s house never really felt like, well, mine. The furniture is all just a bit too basic to really feel worth exploring. You unlock sets of stickers for every five puzzles you complete which I was hoping would add to the decorative elements, but they can only be placed on the game’s menus. There are colour variations of furniture that are available after completing Nini’s Challenges, harder versions of puzzles you’ve already completed, but the fundamental issue of the house just always feeling empty never went away.
Throughout the game, you receive emails that include information on caring for a rat, which is a cute endeavour that I wish had been well-reflected in the game itself. Being able to actually play with your rat, feed it, and ensure its home is suitable would’ve given the decorations much more purpose. Over time, I basically stopped checking in on the home portion of the game at all. There’s really not much to do beyond watching your rat waddle around, which is entertaining for a few minutes at best.
The lack of compelling home decoration does also contribute to a feeling of burnout in the puzzles. To be clear, this is partially a consequence of playing this game for review – trying to see as much of the game as possible meant solving a lot of puzzles.. Squeakross is definitely better enjoyed in smaller, slower bursts. Approaching the game like a book of crossword puzzles, doing one or two before bed, was much more enjoyable than just blasting through them.
That cosiness is where Squeakross absolutely does succeed. It’s a very welcoming, approachable game – there’s lots to do and very little pressure to do it. I thoroughly enjoyed working through the puzzle catalogue and still have so many more waiting for me when I get the puzzle-solving itch. That’s one of the best things about Squeakross, the approachability means it’s always there for when you want it. There’s nothing complicated to relearn, no bizarre mechanics or complex controls, you can just jump in and solve some puzzles with your rodent buddy. An improvement to the home decoration aspect, bringing it inline with the puzzle solving, would just make the package a little more complete, but what’s there now is already an adorably cosy experience.