Quick Look: Picross 3D: Round 2

This game is amazing. This and The Witness are GotY.

Let's see this "greatest game ever".

Edit: All this on-the-fly screen changing!

Why are there 2 blue blocks in the first puzzle if there is no number on the blocks? Shouldn't this row say 2 blue and 2 (with a circle) orange blocks?

I played Mario Picross and the first 3D Picross but this is confusing me..

Edit: Oh, is this a difficulty thing?

Edit2: I should watch the whole thing before asking these questions. So it is really a difficulty thing. It says 0 if it is 0 :)

On my list, but it's $42.30 + tax in Canada. Oof. Have a few of the last puzzles in the prior one to beat anyway.

I think game is too much for my brain..

Only picross game i played is Pokemon Picross cause its free and I'm addicted to it. Sucks that I have to unlock everything with the F2P roadblock but thats the price for not paying anything.

Does it annoy anyone else that GB uses an original 3DS background for the wide shot and a 3DS XL for the lower screen close up? Just me? Okay...

The game's not out in Europe until December. Maybe I'll jot this down as a possible Xmas present.

I liked the first a lot, but Dan brought up the point that mistakes can cost you if you're going for a good score, and it's easy to accidentally hit the wrong cube if you don't have precise stylus control. Maybe this one mitigates that in some way, beyond that super useful bomb feature. Actually, I think I recall playing the first one on a DS with a messed up screen (curse you, Ouendan!), so maybe that's not as much of an issue as I'm making it out to be.

I wish more Picross games did the Pokemon Picross thing of not punishing you for mistakes, but not telling you when you've made one either. That means you don't have to deal with instinctively wanting to start over when you hear a "nuh-uh" noise, but mistakes can still mess your game up if you don't fix them in time.

I still think they missed an opportunity with not calling this Picross 4D

I am a picross addict and cringe every time it's compared to sudoku. It's way better! Glad Dan plays it the same way I do. No jumping to conclusions, no guesses, only logic and restart if a mistake is made. Easily worth the money and a top ten GOTY for me.

I would buy this for like 10, but certainly not for 30. I see a decent puzzle game, nothing more, nothing less.

I have probably 50+ hours in the original. This is an easy buy for me.

I don't see the Sudoku comparison myself, but these games are basically minesweeper.

Hm, it still seems like they haven't added any orthographic projection, but I'm glad there's that zero bomb. And they got rid of that really fucking annoying mascot creature. Maybe I'll pick this up at some point.

It's interesting that this is many times more expensive than the Picross e games...

So glad to see this game getting the love it deserves. I absolutely adored the DS version and I have every Picross game on the 3DS and this looks like an absolute must buy for me. I have a trip to Japan scheduled for December and I'll get this for all the plane/train rides.

Picross games always looks super fun. I should buy a 3DS one of these days. I'm due for an irresponsible purchase sometime soon.

I want this.
The paper version makes for a nice puzzle, but this looks like a lot more fun.

This looks like a hell of a game, and Dan really did a good job showing it off in a fairly tight twenty-minute format.

As someone who plays this game incredibly methodically, watching Dan jump and skip around like a crazy person was seriously disorienting. :p

I just finished my third (yes, third) playthrough of Picross 3D, so I was jumping for joy when this game was announced. Then I saw that it'll be out in Europa in December. :(

@bummlmitz: It's the best game of all time and has over 50 hours of content.

Different strokes for different people I guess ;).

I've never wanted a 3DS so badly in my life. Not to say there aren't already 3DS games that I want to play but IT'S FUCKING PICROSS!!! SHOOT IT INTO MY VEINS!

This looks incredible.

Pick Ross, Pie Cross, lets call the whole thing off

I almost want to buy a 3DS for this. I loved the first game.

I really like that they added difficulty levels for all of the puzzles. I always play the easy puzzles in Picross games since I'm a bit of a completionist, but it's not that challenging or fun. Doesn't look like I'll have to do that with this title. I'm also a fan of the 0 bomb and the new two color paint system looks interesting. I'll be picking this up some time in the near future.

@mento: As someone who doesn't go for the top score and doesn't have the immediate reaction to start over from mistakes, I hated how Pokemon Picross was set-up in terms of failure. There's nothing worse than minor mistakes (sometimes from misplaced stylus control) leading to unsolvable puzzles. I'd get to a 'complete' picture that was incorrect and have to fudge points where the image could change and still look right until I found the actual answer.

Often I'd just restart because trying to find the one error was worse than just restarting. A game which tells you when you make a mistake (and either gives you limited strikes or just lowers score) seems like more fun in the long run (even if it's more annoying in the early game with the small, easy puzzles).

But yeah, I have to wait until December for this as well. Maybe if Dan sticks with it enough to remember it at GOTY awards, I might check it out again (though I doubt I'll remember it on my own).

man i wish i werent such an idiot. id probably hit a wall horribly with this the same way i did with the witness (and im aware how great of a game that is, im just incapable of proceeding in it beyond a point)

still might get this someday to humiliate myself.

A 2DS is very very (very) cheap. I don't live in the USA but it should be less than $100 and then it comes with a game.

Sure it doesn't have the fancy sound of a 3DS and no little stick and no 3D but if you are really hurting for the cash it is a great option.

Picross 3D is one of my favorite games ever, and the word I'd use to describe this one is "disappointing." Picross 3D is a zen experience, with simple mechanics and controls that just let muscle memory take over while your brain laser-focuses on the logic of the puzzle. For this one, the mechanics are so much more complex that, when the puzzles get harder, the experience is less zen and more double- and triple-checking to make sure that you're pressing the right button, that the number is solid instead of faded, that it's a square and not a circle, that the blocks around the one you're going to tap are just flagged instead of painted. It's a fine puzzle game if you don't mind wrestling with controls and mechanics as well as logic, but what I want from Picross is pure logic.

Watching Dan play this is mesmerising.

I need to figure out how to get that reward Zelda version ... I'm completely out of the loop on Nintendo's accounts, loyalty programmes, etc.

I've been playing this so much that when I close my eyes I see the blocks and numbers... it's so good though!

Good to hear Dan plays in the exact crazy way that I do, hard mode, no hints, no guessing, restarts upon striking!

I guess it's time to charge my 3DS

The 3DS is quite literally a Picross machine. It has 6 "mainline" Picross games (e1 through e6, with e7 in the works), a Zelda Picross that you can get as a reward on the new Nintendo rewards thingy, Pokemon Picross and now this. Heck, you can even get Mario's Picross (GB) on the virtual console.

It's pretty easy IIRC. You might have to install and use Miitomo for a while though :P

The 2D Picross games don't show mistakes on Hard but with 3D Picross you destroy blocks which would be difficult to reverse so it always points out mistakes.

@danryckert You can change the controls so that you use the circle pad to pick your tool instead of the buttons. I think I prefer it, only because I can hold the 3DS with my thumb a little higher.

I've never played a 3D picross game, but I owned picross.com from 2004 to 2010 when Nintendo did their Nintendo thing and took it from me. You can still find hundreds of free pokemon or zelda or whatever puzzles from the search page at http://www.heroglyphix.com/search.php.

We actually went to a lot of trouble to keep the site 800x600 resolution for the Wii Opera browser and made it wii-mote friendly with javascript. The term "picross" was becoming genericized, so Nintendo went out grabbing sites and bullying fans. I'd probably love Picross 3D, but I can't bring myself to buy it. Eff Nintendo, Eff'm hard.

:(

I love Picross, and I've perfected nearly every puzzle in Picross3D at least 3 times, but this quicklook really put me off this game. I appreciate trying to up the complexity for the new game but I kind of feel like the colours and the extra tools dilute the experience a bit? Like having multiple colours gives you a chance to make some puzzles based on unique logic, but they also seem like their existence adds too many clues, especially considering that a fundamental part of Picross is that any line with A clue must have EVERY clue for that line. I'm sure there's some great puzzles in this, but IMO the Picross3D formula was perfect and I was hoping for more of the same.

Does anyone know if there's a way to disable the blocks from changing shape before you've finished the entire puzzle? I'm definitely with Dan RE: hating extrapolating from symmetry, and the shape changing blocks just act too much like very obvious, unavoidable clues. (Plus they're ugly af)

Just FYI, the tutorials in this game are quite good at explaining how things work. I doubt that learning how to play from Dan is better than just going through those if you want to understand this game and are unfamiliar with Picross.

The main differences from traditional picross are:

- there are two colors, they each have their own numbers
- rows can have no clues, that just means that any pattern is allowed on this row (and you will have to solve it via the other directions)
- information about multiple groups is not as specific; most numbers indicate a single contiguous group, but if there are multiple groups in the row you don't get told how they are configured, just whether there are two (circle number) or more than two (square number), and the total number of blocks across all groups

@quantris: It's a video game website making video game content, don't overthink it. I don't see anywhere where these guys are claiming that Dan is the ultimate teacher.

Dan if you really love Picross you should check out a game called Hexcells on steam. It's similar but more like minesweeper. I play them exactly like you do with Picross. One mistake and restart. There are three of them and they cost like a dollar or something.

Eventhough I love Pincross, while watching this quicklook I yelled FUCK THIS VERSION! Until I realized Dan was playing on Hard.

I feel a better quicklook would've been playing it on Normal and go from there.

Haven't watched the quick look yet and I see this comment. I think you may have already sold me.

Edit: yup, this is definitely a game for me. Too bad I don't have a 3DS

as someone who has never played picross, Dan was going quite a bit too fast for me to keep up. I certainly see the appeal though, looks great.

If you love these games, give the Hexcells series on Steam a try. Amazing, amazing games!

Is this Minesweeper? You have to tell me if it is.

@avantegardener: agreed, surprised none of the podcast crew made the minesweeper comparison. "Picross is the spiritual successor to minesweeper."

now i want a sudoku minesweeper crossover where it detonates if you put the wrong number in

@bdkmat:I don't know if I would go so far as to say it's "disappointing" because of the complexity increase, but I will definitely agree with you that it can get in the way of the experience. I've played enough Picross to now move through the puzzles as quickly as possible as a habit, and 90% of my Strikes are because I'm holding down the wrong color, thinking I'm using the right one, or mistaking faded numbers.

All I can say is that it gets better. The more I play, the more I get the controls down, and unlike Dan, I have Hard to look forward to, because I intentionally started on Medium so I would have more Picross 3D to play. Now I just need to get my hands on some Amiibos...