Papercut Art Gallery-Nature ★★★★☆

Papercut Art Gallery-Nature, taking the time to relax while piecing together nature itself.

After playing a mosaic puzzle game a long while back, I really wanted to play another game like it, but they’re pretty hard to find, honestly, since a lot of puzzle games are…well, on the NSFW side a lot of times. That or they’re kind of the same puzzles just with different images and that gets a bit old to both look at and just complete over and over again.

I’m happy I found this puzzle game.

• Casual
• Family Friendly
• Hand-drawn
• Indie
• Puzzle
• Singleplayer

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Papercut Art Gallery-Nature Podcast Review

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming. My name is Kay and in this episode we’ll be doing a gameplay review of Paper-Cut Art Gallery – Nature, which is a cut-out puzzle game, basically. I don’t often get to enjoy a lot of normal puzzle games on Steam, so it’s refreshing when I find one that’s unique and I like playing.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I play and record a lot of NSFW games that have a lot of puzzle elements to them. They’re available to watch on my Patreon, as well as my other NSFW videos that involve me doing some obscene commentary or filthy ASMR readings.

The link to those are in the description.

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Back to Papercut Art Gallery – Nature, the short description for it on Steam reads:

An artistic puzzle game inspired by paper cutting art. Piece together fragments of paper cutouts to restore the nature-themed artworks in the gallery.

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As of today, September 4, 2024, the game has very positive reviews, and I can confirm that the game is nice and family friendly. Not a whole lot of difficulty to them, but you might get stuck on some odd shapes of the pieces. But that’s what makes jigsaws so much fun.

The developers, Catnip Studio, have made several other puzzle games and I do plan on playing some of them in the future to see if they hold up to this one or not.

There are 32 achievements to the game and each one corresponds with every puzzle you complete. Meaning there are 32 puzzles in total. The achievements don’t have any interesting names, they’re just numbers for whichever puzzle you completed which is a bit of a shame that they’re so boring.

Nobody wants to complete a puzzle and see a 6 for an achievement instead of a clever title.

That’s about all the outside information we’ve got on the game, so let’s get into the actual review of Paper-Cut Art Gallery – Nature.

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First things first, if you’re watching the video, you’ll notice a change in the layout. It’s not just the gameplay itself and me talking about it, but rather a scene that involves a chat bar on the side. This is because I’ve decided to do a combo of livestreaming a game and then doing podcast portions so my viewers can have some say with their own opinions of certain aspects of a game.

Obviously, I’ll be doing outside editing, so there’s not always going to be chatter on the side, such as right now. This was just a bit of a test. For when there isn’t conversation, I’ll probably have something off to the side as you can see here.

I don’t know when I’ll actually start mixing podcast review portions and livestreams together, but…this is just the start toward it.

If you’re interested in a layout like this for your own livestreaming or recording sessions, you can find a variety of them and more as a Streamlabs Ultra user. To find out more about that, link is also in the description.

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Moving forward, the title screen.

It’s got that 3D cut-out puzzle look to it with the different animals and flowers and layers on layers of images, and if you click on some of the things, they’ll do a little jiggle, so there’s some interactivity to the title screen that makes it nice and more inviting. It’s definitely nature-themed with plants and a forest background and wildlife, although…saying the game is fully about nature itself is a little iffy in my opinion, but we’ll get into that later.

For now, let’s look into the first puzzle.

When you click into it, a pop-up tutorial will show you that you can pick up a puzzle piece with a mouse left-click, and then rotate it with right click, which is amazing that you don’t rotate it with your middle mouse wheel.

Finally it feels like someone’s been listening to me complain that my middle mouse button is broke and that I hate using it because it’s wonky.

And shut up with your buy another mouse bullshit.

I did, okay? It’s arriving soon.

Anyway, the outline of the puzzle itself looks like a bomb with the fuse at the top being a leaf, but there are cut-out sections of different leaf types on the inside border of it and clouds sections along the outside. It basically ends up being portrayed as the world, but the cut-out sections have unique shapes, making piecing things on the board a little bit easier.

The game does like to throw you off a little by cutting the puzzle pieces into tiny shapes that have to fit together to make a whole piece of a section, so don’t think a leafy section is going to be easy to see the piece that fits to it, as that’s not always going to be the case.

But for the first puzzle going into a new game it was fairly easy and took me about five minutes. And yes, it records the time it takes you to finish a puzzle, so if you want to beat someone’s time or your own time, you can try.

Also, this level gives you sound effects of rain. So if you enjoy listening to rainfall, then you’re really going to like this first level.

And just for your listening pleasure…

The second puzzle shows a tree cut-out, making the overall puzzle outline look pretty cool, and I think that’s going to be a plus for a game like this. Because it all deals with cut-out paper pieces, they’re able to make the puzzle shapes more unique rather than just the usual ovals or rectangular sizes.

This puzzle challenges you a bit more due to all the smaller pieces you can fit in, but still, not too bad to do. And if you kind of pay attention to the color coordination, you can tell which trees and leaves and branches will match an area.

The game’s not too bad at color coordinating things in a certain way, but I’m bad at noticing the pattern a lot of times.

The background sound to this level is birds chirping in the distance and at two puzzles in I can say that I really like the background sounds so far. Instead of generic music that’s on repeat, they went with sounds of nature that fit the overall mood of the game, being nature-based.

The third puzzle was the hardest yet because the puzzle outline was just an oval with two shapes at the top. With this one I had to basically find the edge pieces first thing and then work my way through the inside using the unique cut-out shapes.

This kind of puzzle shows you that you can’t always find the edge pieces so easily because they aren’t always going to be large and noticeable. Sometimes they’re skinny pieces.

Ultimately, it became a bee with landing on a main flower, with other flowers and leaves involved as well.

The background sounds in this one were pretty nice to listen to. You’ve got night sounds of crickets and frogs, I think, maybe an animal I didn’t understand, but…the one thing I didn’t like was a growl.

I didn’t know if it was a grizzly or what.

I mean, I doubt it was a grizzly, more like a deep-throated growl, but it didn’t seem like it belonged there.

The fourth puzzle has become even harder with a really wonky outline.

It kind of reminded me of an atom, but with leafy spikes and flower petals jutting out.

Yeah I don’t know how to explain it, sorry. At this point, there’s no smooth edge outlines, so I had to pick up the pieces that would match the funky shapes of the sides. By the end of the puzzle it was all a variety of flowers and different shaped leaves.

As far as the background sounds, it was more frogs than anything else.

The fifth puzzle was simplistic in the sense that it didn’t have a lot of coloration to it. A lot of the smaller parts were matched up with the creature in the middle of which I assume is a koala, based on the ears, though koalas aren’t blue.

Since it has a more cartoony style to the animal I assume it’s being open-minded about maybe a kid putting some of these puzzles together.

The background to this one is super quiet. Like the occasional whisper of an insect in the distance, but nothing that’s so obvious as rainfall or birds chirping or crickets and all that.

It was a little odd after having as much sound as we’ve had so far with the previous puzzles.

The sixth puzzle features a sloth and its baby, so once the foliage was set at the bottom, which is the easiest section, it’s kind of easy to get the rest of the puzzle, considering the sloths are easy to put together.

It’s them and the tree they’re hanging on.

And they actually look like sloths unlike the weird previous koala.

The background sounds to this features some birds, including a woodpecker and a trickling stream.

The seventh puzzle was probably the most difficult one so far. It features a lot of tiny and slim pieces and the overall picture was of…something akin to bellflowers I’m going to say, just because they’re drooping and hang like lights. If I were to match them with another description it would be to say they look like flies.

But apart from them, you’ve got tall grass, a couple flowers at the bottom and a bird in the middle.

I was so busy concentrating on how to fit all the jagged puzzle pieces in that I never even noticed there was a bird until I completed its body.

The background sound is another stream and distant birds chirping.

The eighth puzzle features a pair of toucans and is perhaps the easiest when it comes to fitting all of the edge pieces on the board due to the oval smoothness or the leaf and flower shapes. They’re pretty large pieces.

After that it’s a little easier to figure out the forms of the birds, and then you just have to fit the rest of the pieces in.

The background sounds here are a bunch of birds.

It sort of sounds like you’re in an aviary.

Our ninth puzzle is sort of a generic looking one, with a silhouette of a wolf on a cliffside, howling, only it’s not howling at a moon, but either a setting or rising sun over the mountains, so that makes it a little different.

The cliff overlooks a variety of tall trees which create most of the odd shapes on the board, but once you figure out which color trees go where they’re pretty easy to place.

The background noises are that of crickets in the distance.

The tenth puzzle is a pretty nifty looking one, it’s split into three sections by two tree outlines, and with a circular shape, the edge portions aren’t too hard to pick out from all the pieces. Plus you have the help of notches in the tree shapes so you can align them easily as well.

The ending picture is a deer in the forest at night and despite it being limited in colors, it’s probably one of my favorite looking completed puzzles.

There are distant sounds of insects and frogs in this one, but the audio for them is fairly low.

The eleventh puzzle has a more arctic feel to it with its shades of blue pieces and the light blue of the background itself. Plus, there’s a polar bear as the main animal, though a light silhouette like a lot of the animals are shown as.

I do like how so far it’s not animals they’re putting the main spotlight on, but nature itself.

So, yeah, animals are part of nature, but the beauty of the environments and what grows as part of nature is what it’s really trying to get across with these finished puzzles.

This puzzle does have tiny pieces to it, but a good chunk of the edge pieces are easy to figure out. Once you figure out which shape goes where, placing the pieces together isn’t too difficult.

The backgrounds sounds are just some pleasant sounds of birds and then one obnoxiously loud one, which I wasn’t too fond of. I don’t know what it was supposed to be, other than an annoyingly loud bird.

The twelfth puzzle was an odd one, mainly because I was trying to figure out what kind of animal it was, as the main focus was the creature, except the game took artistic liberty with the colorations of it, making it more of a childlike creation.

Obviously, it’s a deer of some sort, but I don’t know a lot of deer that would be in a jungle, of all places. Forested areas, yea, but a jungle?

It sort of reminds me of a kids show that features a jungle aesthetic, like a learning type of show and not one that’s cartoon animated, but I don’t really know what the title would be.

Anyway, the puzzle itself features large leaves. and combine them with just a normal background with the deer in the center, it can be a little difficult on where things go, especially with all the smaller pieces.

I this one had the more annoying background sounds for me since it was a lot of frogs and, I don’t know, they were a lot louder than most of the other animal sounds we’ve encountered. Having to hear all of them so often started to give me a headache.

The thirteenth puzzle is quite a bit different than the others as it features a car going through an area of trees with a full moon. Probably searching for the animal that shouldn’t be in the forest, but I wouldn’t have suspected this for a nature theme. Sure, it’s nice to drive through areas that feature animals, like when I took the trip to Yellowstone with all the buffalo, but driving through a forest at night is just something you would do to get from one place to another, and not sight-see.

It made for an interesting puzzle, though, since there was a car involved. Sort of made it a bit easier with the car pieces.

These background sounds were quieter and had crickets and cicadas in the distance–much different than the previous puzzle.

The fourteenth puzzle revolves around a colorful hummingbird. The edge pieces are pretty simple to put together due to them either being limbs that are sticking out of the sides or small leaves, so once you’ve got all of that it’s a matter of matching the pieces to the bird itself. Fortunately, it doesn’t have a lot of tiny pieces to fit in.

The background sounds feature birds.

The fifteenth puzzle has a meadow and some greenery to it, but what’s more interesting is there is a mama bear and her cub in the distance, and they’re white, signifying polar bears. It’s really weird seeing polar bears in this kind of setting, due to picturing them in a winter landscape almost all the time. I mean, of course where they live there’s going to be a springtime where snow isn’t on the ground, but…I’m not sure if it’d look something like what’s portrayed by the end of this puzzle.

The background sounds are almost the same as the previous, except a little louder.

The sixteenth puzzle is quite the interesting one, since it has clusters of tree leaves that have odd shapes to them, and you’ll be sticking trunks of trees to these odd shapes. They sort of look like bamboo tree trunks, but I’m not a hundred percent sure on that one. What I do know is there are elephants in this puzzle and the unique shapes of the leaves offer a slight challenge.

The background sounds for this one is a thunderstorm. Not one of my favorite sounds to listen to since they give me anxiety, but…I know a lot of people enjoy them. For some reason.

Now I definitely know the seventeenth puzzle has bamboo trees–kind of the same interesting end pieces to the leaves that you’ll have to fit other parts into–because it has a panda bear in it. Not only that, but there’s also a rabbit and a squirrel and an outline of a deer in the distance.

I don’t think they knew what they wanted to put in for this puzzle, so they threw in a bunch of wildlife, because that’s what nature is full of. A bunch of wildlife.

The background has some pretty loud insect noises to it. It’s one of the persistent noises I wasn’t a fan of.

The eighteenth puzzle features another sloth, this time all on its lonesome, and this puzzle is a little more difficult due to the smaller shapes and the leafy fronds. They make the leaves a lot more bubbly and less defined so it’s not as easy to place them with corresponding pieces.

This is another puzzle that features a thunderstorm in the background.

The nineteenth puzzle happens to be my favorite due to its unique look. There are strips cut out from the puzzle itself and it becomes a campfire when finished. There is definitely a challenge to it due to the way it looks and how things fit together, but with the background sounds of a fire crackling, it’s a nice puzzle to get through.

Not really sure about the end result, because it looks like heartburn of all things.

We went from a dark background to a lighter one in the twentieth puzzle, and I hate it when people decide to do that. It’s never a good idea unless you want to burn someone’s retinas.

Anyway, this puzzle almost screams of a similarity between the tunnel of love, where you usually ride a swan boat with someone and it’s all magical and romantic and totally not my thing.

But it features a lot of Valentine’s Day colorations and has outlines of tulips, herons, penguins, flamingos, and some other birds. Surprisingly no swans that I can tell, unless the top birds are swans, but the hooked beaks tell me they’re flamingos. It’s not a hard puzzle to get through, just really bright.

The background sound seems to be a rain shower with rainwater dripping close by. Like you’re sitting under a porch.

Puzzle number twenty-one features a bunch of African wildlife, such as a lion, an elephant, giraffe, rhino, hippo, and I think a zebra. There’s not much color to it, it’s all greyscale, but every animal stands out. There are small and thin pieces, but given the outline of the animals and plants, they’re pretty easy to find where they go.

Again, rainfall as the background sound.

The twenty-second puzzle is a koi pond, and even the outline kind of looks like a koi pond with its small enclosure and lilypads on the side. At least the lilypads are easy to put in their place, but after that you’ll have to deal with the wonky shapes of the water. Big chunks of them, but wonky nonetheless.

The background sounds for this puzzle is trickling water.

The twenty-third puzzle is a fun one with a unique outline. It looks like chunks of water separated by thin water currents or shallow water. The separated effect also kind of make the puzzle a bit on the harder side since there’s a lot of smooth edges and nothing has a truly defined shape unless you’re counting the small person in a rowboat.

The background sound for this puzzle is very beach-like with waves lapping at the shore.

Our twenty-fourth puzzle is another water one, but more of a close-up of the rower in the boat this time. We’ve also got outlines of fish below the surface, and if I were the person, I’d be a little worried about the size of some of them.

It’s a bit of a more difficult puzzle with the small and thin shapes that don’t have much of a defined corner to be placed into, unless it’s that of a fish.

The background sound here is running water in a river.

Puzzle twenty-five is another water one and this time it’s the background sound of a small waterfall. I mentioned in my livestream that they were trying to make me pee at this point, and they succeeded, the sound in this one really did have me going to the bathroom.

Piecing it together isn’t as bad as the previous ones, since this time there are uniquely shaped edges to some of the pieces, such as with coral.

Puzzle twenty-six was the easiest yet, being a kind of ice mountain with chunks stacked on top of one another and a polar bear. There weren’t any tiny pieces to worry about and I guess the devs might’ve wanted to break up the difficulty and give us something easy to work with.

It’s another running water background noise.

Puzzle twenty-seven isn’t all that hard either and features another polar bear and icy landscape. This time there are smaller pieces, but they kind of all belong to the bear itself, so it’s still not much of a challenge.

The background sound is waves lapping at a beach, and it’s here I’m kind of wondering if they’re running out of background sound effects to use, as a lot of them have had similar noises, but I think they’ve all been at least a little different so far up to this point.

You’d think we’d be clear of the water ones so far, but you’re wrong, because puzzle twenty-eight is yet another water layout with coral pieces and stingrays and jellyfish and a whole lot more. Due to the intricate edge pieces, it’s not a difficult puzzle to get through, even with its small pieces.

Also, we’ve got two divers, so that’s cool, even though the top one’s hair merges with the water making me think maybe she’s not human at all.

The background is waves against the beach.

Puzzle twenty-nine isn’t that much of a water landscape, but it still has water in it, just from an aerial view. This puzzle consists of an airplane going over a portion of the world, and while I wouldn’t mix and match airplanes with nature, I can still see how it fits with the landscapes of the world below to look at.

This puzzle has a lot of weird shapes to it which is both a plus and a nuisance to get through.

I absolutely hated the background sounds to this one as it sounds straight out of a horror game. I don’t know what animal they chose for the sound, but it was very ominous and I felt concern for the safety of those on the plane.

Puzzle thirty.

Once again, water on the bottom, but that’s to be expected as it’s a shot of the world from a distance as a space ship shoots upward in a cloud of space-like smoke. This is where the whole nature theme kind of gets thrown out the window, as I don’t identify space to be a part of nature. It’s a totally different subject altogether.

There’s a lot of tiny parts to this puzzle so it can be a slight challenge.

They stuck with nature sounds on this one which is even more weird. I think cicadas and birds chirping, which doesn’t resonate with a spaceship taking off.

I won’t deny that puzzle thirty-one isn’t cool, because it is. It has a top-down perpective of an austronaut in space looking at…what, mars and saturn? I’m not good with the planets, so I’m not sure if that’s right. But again, despite the perspective being cool, it’s not nature. It’s space.

It’s not too difficult to complete once you know what you’re looking at, but the astronaut can throw you off.

The background sound consists of birds.

I have no idea what to say about puzzle thirty-two, because the shapes are all wonky, making it a bit difficult to get through even though it’s not that big of a puzzle given the amount of pieces you can fit in, but mostly because it looks like there’s a giant white pill in the center. And even though I think this is still space, it looks more like an acid trip than anything else.

Like, take this pill, and you’ll see this trippy universe.

How on earth does this have anything to do with nature at this point? Like, you can’t possibly run out of nature themed puzzles, come on. And here they have.

It’s just a super bizzarre puzzle to end on.

The background sound is rain. Of all things.

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Overall, I really like the game.

Saying every puzzle was nature-themed is a little off the mark, in my opinion, given the whole space ordeal, but it is what it is.

Most of the puzzles I was about to complete within five to ten minutes, if not quicker, and they were a lot more fun than simply connecting one puzzle piece to another. My biggest beef would be about the different background sounds. A lot of them were pleasant to listen to in the short time I was doing the puzzles, but there were also some that didn’t vibe well with me and were triggering a headache from either how loud everything was, or just the consistency of it all.

Also, when the sound effects were at their recorded limit, they’d cut off, and then start over again, so that was a bit jarring.

The same with going from one puzzle to the next. There’d be a moment or two of complete silence, and I never knew if the game was going to crash or not.

But that ends our gameplay review of Papercut Art Gallery – Nature. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to it, feel free to tell us your thoughts on the game, if you find these kinds of puzzles more fun and engaging or if you’re an old-school jigsaw puzzler.

Tell me what you think of the layout as well.

And as always, don’t get in too much trouble when you say, Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.