Today’s rogue discovery is a little different. CiniCross is a challenging dark fantasy puzzle game combined with dungeon crawling. Here, every room throws another nonogram in your path, and filling in the correct squares is how you keep descending. Take too long, make too many mistakes, or reach a boss without the right tricks up your sleeve, and that relaxing game of Picross suddenly starts feeling a lot less relaxing.
Developed and published by Hydrobates, CiniCross launched on Steam on February 11th, 2026. It currently has a Very Positive rating, with 85% of more than 430 player reviews recommending it. That might be a little more attention than some of our Rogue Discovery finds get, but for a game that essentially asks, “What if Picross was a roguelite dungeon crawler?” it still feels pretty undiscovered.
Your Sword Is Basically a Pencil
If you’ve never played a nonogram before, the idea is fairly simple. Numbers along the edges of a grid tell you how many squares need filling in each row and column, and it’s up to you to use logic to work out exactly where those squares belong.
In CiniCross, you begin with smaller 5×5 grids, but the puzzles become increasingly complicated as you descend, eventually reaching 20×20 boards. The deeper you go, the better the potential rewards, but you’ll also have considerably more squares to stare at while wondering where everything went wrong.
Floors are procedurally generated and offer multiple routes, letting you decide what kind of trouble you’d like to walk into next. Along the way you can encounter shops, campfires, and other useful stops before eventually reaching the boss waiting at the bottom, and yes, even the bosses are puzzles.
Bosses Don’t Play Fair in CiniCross
Each boss comes with its own ability designed to interfere with the normal rules. That means reaching the end of a floor isn’t simply about solving a harder nonogram. You may need to rethink the way you normally approach the grid, work around whatever additional problem the boss has introduced, and do it before your run falls apart. Fortunately, you’re allowed to cheat too.
Artifacts and items can completely change how you tackle puzzles. Some automatically fill entire columns, others slow down time, while different effects can increase the rewards you earn or combine into much stronger synergies. That could involve stacking effects that buy you more time, making sections of the puzzle solve themselves, or chasing enough reward bonuses to turn one successful room into a much more lucrative trip through the dungeon.
Yes, You Can Die While Doing a Logic Puzzle
Time matters throughout CiniCross, and every wasted second or incorrect move carries a cost. Fail badly enough and the run ends, sending you back to start again with a new dungeon, new rewards, and another chance to assemble something better.
Hydrobates has continued tweaking the game since launch too, including balance changes to artifacts and rerolls and additional opportunities to pick up free artifacts from rewards. Who needs a sword when you can defeat ancient evil by correctly identifying which six squares belong in row seven?