CiniCross on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information

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CiniCross is a dark fantasy roguelite where nonogram puzzles meet dungeon crawling. Solve increasingly complex puzzles, choose your path through a branching dungeon, and bend the rules using powerful artifacts. Each room is a puzzle. Each boss, a deadly challenge.

CiniCross is a puzzle, time management and dungeon crawler game developed and published by Hydrobates.
Released on February 11th 2026 is available on Windows and Linux.

It has received 307 reviews of which 266 were positive and 41 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.0 out of 10. 😎

The game is currently priced at 11.79€ on Steam.

The Steam community has classified CiniCross into these genres:

Puzzle Time Management Dungeon Crawler Roguelike Roguelite Strategy Replay Value Procedural Generation Casual Dark Fantasy Dark Tactical 2D Choices Matter Pixel Graphics Indie Stylized Fantasy Retro Magic

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at CiniCross through various videos and screenshots.

System requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

OS: Windows 10
Processor: 2 GHz dual-core processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1Gb Video Memory
Storage: 500 MB available space

Linux

OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / SteamOS
Processor: 2 GHz dual-core processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1Gb Video Memory
Storage: 500 MB available space

User reviews & Ratings

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Feb. 2026

Game is fun, but it's as much about RNG as it is about intelligence. At the higher levels, you are literally playing pattern recognition, educated guessing, and a willingness to lose health. There's no other way to kill these giant puzzles in the time limit otherwise.

Feb. 2026

I wish there was a 'neutral' option because this is a really neat premise and I think it has the sauce, but its balance is absolutely all over the place. The puzzle generation seems heavily weighted to keep from giving you 'dead giveaway' lines on more complex puzzles, which, coupled with the kill timer, can make tier 4 and 5 puzzles impossible to complete in time without significant upgrades. This does, sometimes, result in runs where you just get completely screwed by the generation, at which point it's better to abort than waste your time. As an example, I just started a difficulty 2 run as soldier. The first floor gave me the options of a track that was all tier 0, or a track where my first option was a tier 4, so I hit the first boss with only a few upgrades. That boss erases a tile every 5 seconds. Two puzzles into that boss, it gave me a 20 by 20 tile puzzle. Like, that's just a dead run. I do hope this gets tuned with time, because I think the game is usually really fun, and if the frustration gets ironed out (it has a lot of bosses that are more irritating than engaging, like the one I just described) it'd be a much more earnest recommend. EDIT: So I've had a string of really unpleasant runs and I want to elaborate that the puzzles of tier 3 and higher are often really nasty, particularly if you wind up saddled with one before you've managed to accumulate a good set of upgrades. The puzzle generation seems to heavily favor clues under 5, so you'll be looking at a 20 by 20 grid and more than half your clues will be these clusters of 1s and 2s. I'm sure most of these puzzles are technically solvable without guessing, but when you're working against the clock, that isn't the case in practice, and feeling like you have to guess to get by isn't a good feeling, particularly given there are a few cases where I have verifiably had to guess to solve a puzzle.

Feb. 2026

It's fun. I do recommend for the sheer creativity and if you like picross. But It needs urgently a save file system. I don't want to have to play the full run at once. This is not how I play games.

Feb. 2026

Kinda 50/50 on recommending or not, so I'll call it a "wait for updates" for now. As a whole it can be a ton of fun once you adapt your brain to taking risks and playing around hp. Promo material doesn't do a good enough job of emphasizing how important the timer is, so be wary of that. Your enjoyment of this game will very much depend on how ready you are to work under pressure and time constraints. Items can be cool, but a lot of them are clearly balanced with endless mode in mind and nothing else; Many item effects are extremely underwhelming until a very large number of stacks are collected, meaning a lot of the items you'll roll in standard runs are basically dead weight. The item pool is also pretty significantly overbloated with healing items, which I imagine were felt to be necessary with how tight the timer can be sometimes. Overall I feel like item balance/scaling should be adjusted to take shorter runs into account. Auto-cross on row completion is restricted to a LEGENDARY item roll, which feels... Really weird?? I imagine this is for balance as crossed tiles are counted as completed for items that proc based on tile completion counters, but it still just feels really awkward in practice. Imagine if someone made a Tetris roguelite and locked different drop speeds behind a rare item roll. Balance-wise I get it, but it's just a very strange way of addressing the issue. Bosses in general are pretty poorly designed (Torch is awful unfun garbage that is borderline unplayable on large boards) and/or significantly overtuned (Black Cat is a fun idea conceptually, but is currently really bad for motion sickness). A lot of new roguelites right now like to rip Balatro's annoying boss style and add their own twist to it, and this game's twist is to design all of the bosses to either arbitrarily make the game feel 1000x worse to play or to aggressively overpunish every mistake to where you can no longer reasonably play under the constraint of the timer. Boss encounters haven't felt like they're testing the strength of my build, they're just annoying for the sake of being annoying. Despite how negative this all sounds, I'm a huge fan of the idea here. I think most of the game flows really well, and at the end of the day it's pretty hard to screw up nonograms. I like seeing a puzzle format that is traditionally very slow and deliberate be put into this sort of fast-paced context. At its core this game is pretty awesome and I hope that balance adjustments come soon to smooth out the experience where needed.

Feb. 2026

Normally I play Picross/nonograms to relax. This one ain't relaxing, but it's loads of fun. CiniCross basically throws nonograms at you one after another with a Slay the Spire-type progression map, where you acquire artifacts and purchase consumables. Very simple, very fun. The twist is that there's a time limit and hit points involved. Make mistakes and you take damage. Run out of time and you begin to take damage. Boss fights require you to complete nonograms to damage them. Normally I hate time limits in my puzzle games, but it works pretty well here. You can't sit back and go for perfection, you eventually need to start making educated guesses and use your consumables to get to the next level. I do recommend CiniCross for people who've played nonograms before. I imagine it might be stressful and annoying if you're starting from scratch. If you haven't played one before, at least check out the demo before buying, or use another game (Pictopix, Voxelgram) to build up your nonogram mental model before diving in.

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Frequently Asked Questions

CiniCross is currently priced at 11.79€ on Steam.

CiniCross is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 11.79€ on Steam.

CiniCross received 266 positive votes out of a total of 307 achieving a rating of 8.01.

😎

CiniCross was developed and published by Hydrobates.

CiniCross is playable and fully supported on Windows.

CiniCross is not playable on MacOS.

CiniCross is playable and fully supported on Linux.

CiniCross is a single-player game.

CiniCross does not currently offer any DLC.

CiniCross does not support mods via Steam Workshop.

CiniCross does not support Steam Remote Play.

CiniCross is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.

You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for CiniCross.

Data sources

The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.

Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.

Last Updates

Steam data	01 March 2026 19:11
SteamSpy data	01 March 2026 13:07
Steam price	01 March 2026 21:01
Steam reviews	28 February 2026 15:45

If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about CiniCross, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.

SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about CiniCross
SteamCharts - Analysis of CiniCross concurrent players on Steam
ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck CiniCross compatibility

11.79€ Buy Now

Rating

8.0

266

Game modes

Features

Online players

Developer

Hydrobates

Publisher

Hydrobates

Release 11 Feb 2026

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CiniCross on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information

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