Alice Bell is a game critic, author and podcaster who has played Nonograms CrossMe for “thousands of hours”.
Earlier in 2026 I went on an ill-advised “new year, new me!” kick, to try to use my time more productively. Much like Jane Goodall observing the behaviour of a particularly listless gorilla, I have been examining my own habits, and I shouldn’t have embarked upon this project, because now I know I spend around three hours a day playing Nonograms CrossMe.
That’s on a good day. Last Saturday I put in nearly six! I have been working in and around videogames for over 15 years at this point, and have previously told people that my most played game is BioWare’s epic fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Inquisition, into which I have put almost 300 hours.
But it is not my most-played game. If the average holds true, I have been playing a free-to-play nonogram puzzle game with dubious image sourcing for over 1,000 hours a year. For multiple years.
You might know nonograms as picross, or pic-a-pix, or Hanjie. They’re puzzles where you create a picture by coloured squares in a grid or leaving them blank, as indicated by numbers along the sides. They were invented in Japan in the 80s by Non Ishida, who first conceived of images made by using the lights in skyscraper windows.
If only Ishida could have dreamt of the future of nonograms: me, lying slack jawed on my side in bed, the light of my phone screen scouring my retinas as I complete a picture of a clown holding a balloon at 1AM.
But though the stark discovery of my 20-ish hours a week play time has been felt like the abyss staring back at me, that fault is mine, not CrossMe’s. It’s a remarkably player-friendly free-to-play app, for several reasons.
Firstly, it is monetised entirely through in-app purchase. That’s right: this is the rare “Look mum, no ads!” app. And the in-app purchases are just error corrections or line reveals, which are dispensed to you for free if you successfully complete puzzles anyway. This means that if you are good enough at nonograms – and at three hours a day you’d better believe I am – CrossMe is completely free, forever.
Secondly, it has unbelievably regular updates to add more puzzles (both in colour and black and white). Even I, who approach this game every day of the week the way Canary Wharf bankers approach cocaine on a Friday, have never run out of content.
Finally, and this is probably my favourite part, it is clear that the overheads are kept low by the developers’ liberal approach to image ownership. I have lost count of the number of times I have rendered the world’s most famous Italian plumber out of coloured squares, only to be told by the title that I have just created ‘Video Game Character’.
There is something inescapably charming about spending several hours painstakingly counting different shades of grey from left to right on a puzzle called simply ‘Celebrity’, only to zoom out and see I have been working on Robert Pattinson’s nose, as surely Da Vinci carved David. Sorry, I mean of course ‘Famous Artist’ carved ‘Statue’. May we all be reduced to our purest essence in such a brutal fashion.
CrossMe is a good app, then. The real reason I’m unnerved by how much I play it is because the listless ape at the start of this metaphor is diagnosably unwell. I play nonograms when I am anxious or my ADHD is particularly bad, as it is stimulating as well as a focus point that grants control over the environment. The graph of how much I’ve been playing it week to week is like a real time bar chart of my fluctuating menty-h.
Apparently things right now are “three hours a day” bad, but given the context of the world that’s maybe understandable. And to CrossMe’s eternal credit, I’ve tried a lot of nonogram games, and none of them put up even 45 minutes a day. Those are rookie numbers. But I still, when playing it, have the nagging feeling I should be doing something else.
