I'm not sure I'm in any mood to argue whether or not Jupiter Corporation - which enjoys a close relationship with Nintendo, but is presently not owned by them as far as I am aware - counts as an Indie studio, as this insouciance is largely inspired by all this sweltering weather. Of course, being stuck in a high-humidity soup for a month straight is a far sight from the tragic floods of Germany and Belgium or the spontaneously combusting towns of Canada, but it's enough to sweat out any desire to tackle anything too mentally taxing while I stew in my own juices. Picross is, fortunately, about as far from mentally taxing as you can get: that's not to say the puzzles can't get tough, but picross is the type of puzzle game where absolute adherence to a set of rules is paramount for solving them. In that sense, they're not too dissimilar to the likes of Minesweeper or Mahjong Solitaire: either have a plan going in, or fail enough times that the right strategy eventually emerges. That means that for a seasoned player of any of the above, a session can allow you to stick your brain on auto-pilot while you listen to podcasts or city pop YouTube compilations.

Picross S3 is the third of Jupiter's picross series to be released on the Nintendo Switch, hence the S in its title (much like a bag of Skittles, it used to be all E-numbers and little else when the series was on the 3DS). Jupiter's been at this Nintendo picross gig for a while now - one of their earliest games was Mario's Super Picross, a 1995 Super Famicom game, and its Game Boy partner - and they've been fairly regular with these Switch iterations every year since the system's launch back in 2017: they're even a little ahead of its annual schedule now, with the recently released Picross S6. However, my issue with Jupiter's S-series in the past - as I have indeed played and completed the first two - is that while it has an undoubtedly slick interface, it's a whole lot of style over substance and far too many corners are cut for a £9 Picross game. I was hoping Picross S3 bucks the trend I've seen emerging after the first two, and it ultimately both does and does not.

The one big issue, and one that continues to be the case here, relate to the game's "Mega Picross" puzzles. Rather than a larger puzzle made of several smaller Picross (it has those too, but with the less germane name of "Clip Picross") Mega Picross puzzles are these interesting variants where the number clues for two rows are sometimes mushed together, making them much harder to figure out. (For a primer on the basic rules of picross, a.k.a. nonograms, check its GB wiki page. I've reviewed too many of these games to want to explain them again. Apologies, but like I said, it's been a low-effort kinda week.) Said issue is that all the Mega Picross puzzles are just the regular puzzles in a slightly different order, rather than new puzzles. Not only is that some major corner-cutting, but playing one set after the other makes it much easier to intuit these puzzles: something you shouldn't, technically, be able to do. A well-crafted picross puzzle requires no estimation or guesswork, despite what some sources will have you believe, but it's too tempting to recreate lines as you remember them from the identical puzzle you completed several hours (or days) ago. Only a few of us have the sort of eidetic recall to perfectly memorize a puzzle, but the process of completing each one - identifying which lines are the easiest to ascertain and working outwards from there - tends to be consistent and will trigger faint memories all the same.

For Picross S, all you had were the standard puzzles and the identical but harder Mega Picross to solve, which left that first iteration with a sour first impression. Picross S2 added the Clip Picross - the aforementioned large-scale mosaics where you solve multiple smaller puzzles to produce a massive image - but they were few in number and weren't sufficient value-adds. Picross S3 adds a new Color Picross mode, one that adds a level of new complexity the previous two were lacking. There's only a handful of these also - thirty in total, compared to the 150 normal/Mega puzzles - but each iteration has been making a stronger case for itself than the last. The Color Picross puzzles have some smart integration to work with the limited tools of the Switch controller - you switch around the palette with a face button, with a handy icon that follows you around to indicate which color you're on, while the other face buttons have the same "X" (for marking tiles that aren't in use) and "O" (for marking tiles that may or may not be active, mostly used when working out overlaps) functions as they do in the normal monochrome puzzles. This is a much more elegant style than I've seen in other color-based picross puzzles, that throw the X and O forms in along with all the hues, meaning you have to switch all the way over to them to use them each time.

The game is also replete with accessibility options, many of which are irritatingly active as defaults even for those who wanted to go into the puzzles "pure" and without guidance. Importantly, the clean mode - that is, with all the assist modes off - is the kind that won't inform you of mistakes and subsequently won't immediately punish you for them, which has been a personal bête noire with puzzles in other Picross games. You can still dig yourself into a hole if you make an error, since they tend to snowball rapidly, but at least I don't have to hear an irritating buzz in my ear and a notice that I can no longer "perfect" the current puzzle without starting over.

I might not have recommended the Switch series of Jupiter's Picross prior to S3, but this is the first entry to make a strong case for itself. I've played enough picross in my lifetime that I've come to appreciate the bells and whistles and variants that the more out-there picross games - PictoQuest, for instance, was a flawed but noble attempt to reinvent the format with bolted-on RPG mechanics, Murder By Numbers heightened its simple puzzles and a lackluster interface with a mature and compelling storytelling framing device, and the free-to-play Pokémon Picross was a bundle of smart ideas let down by its obnoxious panhandling - that another selection of basic picross puzzles increasing in complexity isn't enough any more. I've stuck with Jupiter for a long time - heck, it's only because of them that I even know what a picross is (though I'm sure I would've picked it up elsewhere eventually) - so I know they're capable of more interesting games than this. I am intrigued by their upcoming Sega-focused Picross S: Mega Drive & Mark III Edition and am slightly more likely to pick up Picross S4, S5, and S6 when they next go on sale, but I'll continue to call these genre veterans out for any and all corner-cutting and coasting I find in these sub-annual releases.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far. I'm not expecting much to change in the game's latter half though.)