Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams is a PC videogame that simulates the full experience of doing a jigsaw puzzle. There are many websites and games for the purpose of doing jigsaw puzzles -- what makes this one unique is that it renders the puzzle on a table in a room, and you can customize everything about the room; the materials and colors of the table, the walls, the furniture; you have a kitchen, a couch, a bedroom. The graphics are gorgeous with Unreal Engine 5 and it runs on under a gigabyte or RAM. What's more -- once you complete the puzzle, you can hang it on the walls anywhere in the room. You can put it above the stove, on the wall of the bedroom, etc. and you can adjust the size as you see fit. Furthermore, you can set the game up so that it runs a timer in the background, and tells you how much time it took you to complete the puzzle.
Everything has physics -- each piece, the preview image, the puzzle. You can drag it around, it can collide with other pieces, it can go tumbling off the table. It sounds like it would be easy to lose pieces; HOWEVER, there is a button that says "return pieces to table", and it will dump onto the table every piece that's fallen or been placed elsewhere. I will say, though -- I noticed that on some surfaces (chairs), the pieces will clip through the very top edge of the surface because the hitbox is slightly below, and you will not be able to find the piece unless you click the return to table button -- you gotta be cautious when you place pieces off the table.
The controls are simple. You click on a piece to pick it up, and then use E or R to rotate the piece left or right. You can choose the degree to which you want to rotate the pieces with each button press; I have mine set to 45 degrees. You can also shift-click and drag to select multiple pieces. When you think you've found a match, drag it to where it needs to be and click to let go. If it matches, it'll snap into place with a little click sound -- very satisfying! You can also "lock pieces" (or groups of pieces), which prevents them from being picked up or moved; I always do this to the main puzzle once I have the frame in place.
I've been on a jigsaw puzzle kick. I'm currently working on a 1000 piece and, let me tell ya, sorting the pieces takes forever. I think I'm 3hrs into the puzzle and I'm still sorting pieces. The image I chose is REALLY difficult because half the pieces are all the same flat color -- I wanted a challenge! Even if it takes me a bajillion hours, it will be worth it to have the satisfaction of hanging it up on my (digital) wall -- I think it's going to go above the sofa.
Oh, did I mention it's FREE?? It comes with 29 puzzles, and you can buy packs of new puzzles for $5 -- there are four or five of these packs. If you buy any one of the packs, you get access to the feature where you can upload your own picture into the program and make a puzzle out of it. You can choose any number of pieces -- there are some presets (100, 400, 600, 1000, etc) but you can punch in your own custom number. Any picture at all, you can get em from pinterest or google or anything like that. It's awesome. Also, you can browse a huge library of puzzles other people have uploaded, and do any of their puzzles.
I'm in love with this game. I could foresee myself sinking a thousand hours into it.