After a slight disaster trying to get Everything to run on this PC (it does, but only sorta), I decided to take a walk down Easy Street via Phoning It In Avenue this time and opted for what I initially perceived to be a throwaway picross game I could write a few hundred words about, largely because I was getting a little frustrated at an already irksome week and picross has always been a tonic for more trying times. It turns out that Paint It Back! - a 2015 Steam release that was a former iOS/Android game from a developer named Casual Labs, so not the highest hopes going in - is actually close to my Picross platonic ideal. Not the best picross game ever made, I'll hasten to clarify, but one that is absolutely on my own personal wavelength when it comes to picross puzzles.

Picross, also known as nonograms, are... well, we have a page that explains what they are. They're a fairly popular puzzle format, one originally championed by Mario himself way back in the day, if only in the western hemisphere where the pen-and-paper kind hadn't yet taken over every magazine kiosk and office desk corner the way it had in its native Japan. I know the Giant Bomb staff are fans: they rated last year's Picross 3D: Round 2 very positively (though I had a few reservations with it myself) and registered some pleasant surprise recently at the sudden appearance of a picross game on Switch, imaginatively titled Picross S. Because a picross image can be absolutely anything, as long as it can rendered in a pixel grid rarely exceeding a size of 20x20 or 30x30, there's an immense breadth to what can be used to create a picross puzzle. At the same time, the best ones are those that offer a challenge while still being solveable without necessitating random guesswork. I can only imagine how much trial and error goes into creating a picross puzzle and ensuring it errs on the right side of impossible.

What most Picross games rarely do, and I realize this is a contentious issue, is opt for Wario Mode over Mario Mode. In lieu of better descriptors, the Super Famicom version of Mario's Super Picross (which eventually joined its Game Boy brethren over in English-speaking territories when it was localized for the European Virtual Console in 2007) split its puzzles under the banners of two of Nintendo's biggest characters: Mario and Wario. Mario Mode had you solving a puzzle with a certain allowance for mistakes, with each error the player made automatically fixed by the game at the cost of one of these finite "lives". Wario Mode, meanwhile, did not penalize the player for mistakes. It also meant that it wouldn't point out when an error was made, allowing the player to essentially paint themselves into a chaotic mess if they misjudged a row several minutes ago. I've always found the latter to be more fair, however: if the player makes a mistake and messes up the whole picture, they only have themselves to blame, whereas Mario Mode punishes genuine errors and simple misclicks alike. Games that follow the Mario Mode model frequently award top marks - which then go on to unlock more stages or provide other benefits - only to those who complete puzzles without mistakes. To misclick so close to the conclusion of a tougher puzzle, perhaps because the grid is so big that it's far too easy to be a pixel off and hit the adjacent box by accident, is nigh agonizing. Paint It Back! seems to agree with me, whether inadvertently or not, and I appreciate that it's one of the few conveniently accessible picross games around that opts for that particular rule.

There's even more to appreciate here as well. The puzzles don't have a stressful timer to judge the quality of your performance, but rather offer three difficulty levels for the larger puzzles. What these do is split the puzzle into sections with each section's size defined by the difficulty. So a 30x30 puzzle would be nine separate 10x10 (9 x 10 x 10 = 900 pixels) puzzles for a Normal-level player, or four separate 15x15 (4 x 15 x 15 = 900 pixels) puzzles for a Pro player, or the full 30x30 (1 x 30 x 30 = 900 pixels) puzzle for a Master player. It's a system that doesn't change the selection of images for differently skilled players, which is a clever step on the developer's part as it means not having to create three distinct sets of puzzles, and means that you can go at your own pace at any level of challenge without being hassled to hurry up for the sake of a perfect score. There's also the game's brilliant sense of humor, with which it takes the often abstract images created through picross's limited pixel art canvas to have some fun at the format's expense. As a painter's assistant trying to recreate all the portraits in a gallery after the originals are scared away by a ghost, which is your pretty standard picross set-up, each one has a mock-artisanal name and some kind of visual joke involved. A painting found in the "Good Advice" gallery, for instance, is simply called "Keep Both Hands on the Wheel": it's only after solving the puzzle that you see that it's some unfortunate soul hanging onto the top of a Ferris wheel for dear life. These goofs not only serve to elevate the game's selection of images above recreating the same group of animals and landmarks and household devices that every picross game seems to offer, but add an unexpected twist reveal that's not always easy to predict ahead of time, making the puzzles themselves more fun to solve. I'll get halfway through a picross of a chicken before I know it's just a damn chicken, but an image of a smushed roadkill chicken in the middle of a road called "Why the Chicken Didn't Cross the Road" is a little trickier to see in my mind's eye until the puzzle's over. I even like the game's music; it's meant to be a selection of jazzy little chiptune numbers to befit the game's casual style, but in practice sound more like cheery visual novel music, of the kind you'd hear during the quiet moments of an Ace Attorney game or an homage like 2064: Read Only Memories.

I wasn't expecting a whole lot from Paint It Back! besides a whole lot of picross, given how little effort these games usually require beyond the puzzles themselves, but I was pleasantly surprised by this game for following my preferred picross ruleset and adding a welcome dash of humor to its presentation. I've been sticking to the Master level puzzles so far, because they earn you the most progression currency, and even though it's still early days I'm finding some of these larger grids quite difficult. I suspect it'll be another game like last week's Flinthook that I'll dive into occasionally during the months to come.

Rating: 5 out of 5 (but only if you like picross).