While there are plenty of indie games on the eShop that demand a great number of words, either to sing their praises or knock them down a few pegs, there are also those where I find that words fail me. Rather than being at the high or low end of the spectrum, they’re just kind of somewhere in the middle-to-low zone, absolutely playable but not terribly exciting either. While Cozy Stitch Puzzle may play just fine, and while starting almost mind-numbingly simple it does ratchet up the challenge, it ultimately falls into this zone for me.

The concept is a pretty simple one, with you being given a series of pleasant figures that will be cut up, with your job being to simply piece them back together. Now, at the start this is a pretty basic exercise, as at the lowest difficulty level the characters will only be cut up into a small handful of pieces. You’ll simply pick them up, rotate them into the proper orientation, and then drop them so the edges roughly meet, and very soon you’ll have your completed puzzle. For the most part, using the controller to do all of this works adequately, but I’ll note that the lack of a touchscreen option feels like a real missed opportunity without a doubt.

Once you’ve worked through any given collection at a given skill level the next will open up as an option, and each step up does represent a pretty significant increase in difficulty. That’s where you’ll begin to notice the effect of the game breaking the image up into pieces procedurally, and that works out to be both a positive and sometimes an issue. Since you’ll only be dealing with straight edges instead of more classically-shaped puzzle pieces, getting oriented and figuring out how particularly small pieces go and fit can be a challenge. This is exacerbated further by pieces that will only get parts of edges or other strange bits, and it’s times like those where it feels like perhaps some more work should have been done in defining the rules for the routine cutting things up in the background.

This results in a game that is at least invested in making it something you could choose to continue to return to, with each puzzle feeling more fresh than if the pieces were locked in, but that does come at a price. It is nice that there are 3 skill levels that feel quite different, and over 120 puzzles to work through, but in the end to get the most out of it you’ll have to be very invested in what little variety it can ultimately offer. The images and shapes will change, but the process remains the same, and the lack of some added value with touchscreen support, or slightly improved piece cutting, could have at least helped to make it a bit more fleshed out and easier to recommend.