Done With #21: Squeakross: Home Squeak Home

I’d never thought that I’d be stuck solving puzzles for hours on end just to get cosmetic items for my pet rat in a video game. This must be some bad karma from making fun of the adults when I was a kid whenever I see them solve crossword puzzles. Well, it is the big 2025 after all, and anything can happen.

At first I wasn't even aware of Squeakross: Home Squeak Home’s existence at all. It wasn’t until last week’s Wholesome Game Direct 2025 (where a bunch of relatively unknown titles got the chance to shine on the two hour livestream) I found out about this cute ass game. I was completely smitten by the concept and instantly bought a copy for myself on Steam.

Well, with this game you do actually get to live out the socialist dream that will never happen in real life thanks to billionaires. You play as the lucky house rat that was assigned a house, with the housing agency, Nini, guiding us through the onboarding process (based). The catch is that for us to earn things to decorate our house with, we must solve picrosses (or nonograms) known as Squeakross! That’s right! Nini isn’t kidding about it because that’s essentially the entire gameplay loop; we solve puzzles to get more items to decorate the house with!

With that said, there are two moving pieces to this game, first being the house decoration aspect. It’s a run of the mill grid-based system that allows us to place items on square tiles. Our little rat buddy will start off with a decent size room to make it their own, but the game will quickly expand as we get more rooms to decorate the more we solve the Squeakrosses.

This isn’t some additional gimmick to trick you into playing what’s essentially a picross game either, as our little cuties have unique interactions with these unlockable furniture. This actually gives a huge incentive to keep playing the game to see all the available interactions that the game provides.

Of course, the main highlight of the game itself is the Squeakrosses themselves. For those who are unfamiliar with picrosses/nonograms, they are essentially number-based puzzles where you’re given numbers as instructions to fill blank spaces to “draw” a picture of something (household items and costume of our rats in this case). This might be a little confusing and can get rather complex as the game goes on, but the team at Alblune really thought it through and included multiple tutorial and accessibility options to help struggling players out.

Completing these Squeakrosses will reward you a piece of furniture or a costume for your rodent friend! These rewards become “cooler” overtime to give a sense of progression, with the difficulty curve also increasing at a very reasonable pace. There are up to 325 unlockable items, and “hard mode” puzzles for additional modification As mentioned previously, this game is incredible when it comes down to accessibilities ranging from visually to the game’s difficulty. There are multiple systems to ease you into playing the game, utilising our rat as the “hint giver” where they can help us solve a row/column by randomly solving 1 tile, giving us probability rate of a row or a column’s outcome or checking if our progress so far is correct or not. The game also provides dark mode and high contrast mode for people with visual difficulties, and you can pretty much customise your experience to your heart’s content based on your preferences.

However, that’s not all you can customise! That’s right! This game also gives you a bunch of stickers to decorate literally every aspect of this game. From the main menu’s UI to the Squeakross UI itself, you can personalise literally almost every single aspect of the game. This might not mean much to many, but honestly being able to slap on cute rats and pride flags on my screen make me really happy.

While the game lacks an overarching story, you do receive in game e-mails occasionally. These mails range from bad rodent puns to resources and rescues organisations that help real rodents out. There’s also a lot of actual facts about the species. Checking these out can be rather charming to be honest.

If you’re a fan of puzzle games and love decorating houses in video games, this is the perfect match for you! The game’s price point is also very friendly, and can be purchased on the Nintendo Switch, itch.io or on the game’s Steam page.