Proverbs review | Rock Paper Shotgun

What great hopes I had for the Christmas holidays. Finally, I thought, I would have time for some of the recent blockbusters I’d not yet played: Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and more would fill those dusty days and nights in the taint of 2024.

Then I mentioned in a review that I liked Picross games, which for me can dissolve hours or entire weekends like sugar in water. “I don’t know if that means I should recommend Mark Ffrench’s games Proverbs and Mega Mosaic to you, or warn you to steer clear and avoid flowing away forever,” responded commenter SeekerX.

You see where this is going. Friends, I played Proverbs for 36 hours over Christmas.

Proverbs presents its victim with a truly vast grid of squares, upon which you can zoom in and out like it’s the Supreme Commander of puzzle games. Some of the squares have numbers inside and the number tells you how many squares need to be coloured-in from the area surrounding it. See the number 9? Click the left mouse button to colour that square and the eight that touch it for a perfect little 3×3 block. See the number 0? Click the right mouse button to demarcate a 3×3 area of negative space, instead.

The grid is split into smaller segments, which when completed reveal a piece of the picture behind. That picture is a pixel art recreation of Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 oil painting “Netherlandish Proverbs”, which depicts a bustling scene of humans and animals, each engaged in an illustrative example of a Dutch-language idiom.

It’s a delightful painting, rich in playful detail as people grip each other’s noses, wipe their bums on doors, and tie devils to pillows. Several of the idioms remain in use today, as with the man banging his head against a brick wall. Others are less familiar, such as the sight of two bums hanging out of a hole in a wall (“They both crap through the same hole”, meaning “they are inseparable comrades”, Wikipedia informs me). The rendering of those bums as pixel art maintains much of their charm.

This process of uncovering the image is like a cross between Picross and Minesweeper. You scan around for safely uncoverable areas (9s, 0s, a 6 against a border, a 5 in a corner, and so on), and once a foothold is found, progress spreads outwards, one solution suggesting the next. It may be difficult to visualise when described, but if you fill in a block of 9, and the corner of that block contains the number 4, then you know that the remaining five blocks surrounding that 4 are negative space and can mark it as such immediately.

This is a stacked and deadly chain of dopamine hits, for me. Picross puzzles are not hard and solving them at any scale becomes second nature once you know the logic necessary, yet correctly marking each block in these patterns is satisfying every time, like slotting a Tetris block into just the right spot. Once begun, it’s hard to stop, because there’s always another solution in sight and another segment of the whole nearly complete. I’d just do one more, then another, then another.

Eventually my eyes glazed over and there was almost no conscious thought involved in playing Proverbs. Its interface projects a little 3×3 highlight around your mouse pointer, designed to make clear the blocks a number is referring to. That’s useful, particularly near the boundaries between segments, but after a few hours I no longer needed it. The projection existed in my mind’s eye and I saw squares everywhere.

As I drifted deep into a numbing flow state, the one conscious thought that remained was that I was wasting my time, my holiday, my life. Video games are rarely productive in a strict sense, but they can feel particularly wasteful to me when stripped of decision-making, narrative and challenge. I truly believe that it’s OK to do nothing worthwhile with my spare time, if that’s what I want – but is it what I want?

I developed a strange fondness for specific combinations of numbers and squares. A 6 in the middle of a 3×1 of negative space abutting a 3×1 of positive space? That’s heaven, friends. A 5 in the corner of a 4×4 of negative space? Delight. A 3 in the corner? That’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion.

I found myself daydreaming ways to justify the time. I could, it occurred to me, become deeply and deliberately fascinated by the painting “Netherlandish Proverbs”. I could read a biography of Pieter Bruegel and hang a print of it on the wall of my flat and impress people when they come over with my knowledge of Early Modern artwork. “Oh, I actually first encountered it in a video game,” I’d say, shattering the boundaries between low and high art forever. I could write a review for Rock Paper Shotgun, I decided, but not just any review – a concept review of the sort I haven’t done in years, which exaggerates my slow derangement for comic effect (but which would ultimately elide rather than illustrate my real experience, so no, let’s not).

When I reached 25% completion, a lute-playing character appeared in the static room in which the painting hangs in-game, visible when you zoom out fully. I took a screenshot of him and sent it to Alice B (RPS in peace). ‘Look! A mystery unfurls! What might happen at 75% completion? Please play Proverbs too and validate the time I’m spending here.’ (There is no mystery, but Alice did start playing it. Two fools under one hood, as the Netherlandish proverb goes. Success.)

At some point during my playthrough, YouTube video essayist Big Joel released a six-hour video in which he watches every Disney Channel Original Movie ever made. Perfect, I thought! Proverbs has medieval muzak but I had switched it off in favour of re-watching video essays on a second screen, and now here was a new and extremely long one to keep me company.

When I went to sleep that night, I dreamt about completing an endless grid of squares and numbers, my progress accompanied by the unusual rhythms of Big Joel narration. I did not like this dream, I did not like it, at all. When I awoke, the narration stopped, but the background process running Proverbs in my brain did not. It was there when I closed my eyes, as if my brain was defragmenting.

It’s been over a month since I finished Proverbs and I’m better now. Would I recommend anyone play it? I don’t know! It is £7.49 for 35 hours of smooth-brained entertainment and/or makework, depending on your perspective. It’s an anti-social jigsaw, a craft project that is not an act of creation but of erasure, a time skip to Monday morning. I don’t know if I should recommend Proverbs to you or warn you to steer clear and to avoid flowing away forever.

Maybe try the demo first?

A copy of this game was attained for free using a press account for the purpose of review.