Quick Look: Picross S

Picross!!! this and 3D round 2 have been my life blood for awhile.

I actually bought the Picross 3D last night for my 3DS and dammit Dan it's so good.

If you don't have Switch Picross Luna on your smartphone is a good alternative.

I would gladly watch a series of Dan and Vinny play Picross S 2P with split joycon a la Linked Together on IGN.

No touch = No buy. I cannot stand using the controls for Picross. I understand that capacitive touch isn't great with styli, but just make use of the larger screen and let you use fingers.

I've never tried a Picross game. This might be my time!

I do like these games but I feel that this is a extreme simplification of what Sodoku does.

A friend my mine casually solves hard Sodoku puzzles in around 2-3 minutes and its kinda like seeing a super fast rubicks cube solver solve a puzzle in like 30 seconds. Fascinating stuff.

I wish there would be more polished and pretty looking Nonogram games for the PC apart from the online flash ones that are everywhere.

I love the addition of the marked tiles, specifically because I really love mega picross, but there's more complex processing going on there, so marking what i'm potentially working with is so useful.

Picross I bet this is Da-- yup

I play a lot of Paint It Black, you can find it on steam. It's the best one I've found for PC. OR you could emulate the old Mario Picross for the gameboy if you want the actual best version of picross.

This looks very similar Jupiter's previous game, Pokemon Picross on 3DS. I'm curious what new stuff they added in this. The mega-lines were in that game too.

There was this free Pokemon Picross game on the 3ds that I played all the time.. That also had the mega picross puzzles.. Tons of fun.

I'll also throw PicrossMon in the ring for that. It's good, but every once in a while they'll throw in one of their monster characters, and sometimes you're just like "what the hell is this supposed to be?" until you figure it out. It's got a nice hand-drawn art style to it though.

I've only played the 3D picross games and I love them. Why can't I get in to 2D picross? I don't know why but it seems really unappealing to me. I should just really try one. I think part of it is the UI is so much clearer in 3D with the numbers painted on the blocks.

Really dig the Mega Picross mode, but it is a bit unfortunate that they are re-using the pictures from the regular mode. I switched to playing Mega Picross now and not touching the regular mode anymore to avoid spoiling some of the patterns.

I solve both Sudoku and Picross puzzles, and believe me, they are not simple on the harder end of the difficulty scale. Especially the 3D picross, those can get hellish.

The mega-picross rules are a little more convoluted, but once you've done a couple, it makes perfect sense and is a nice complement to the standard picross.
That said, the last picross I did, it used all the same pictures as the standard picross, which is a minor bummer.

Give me more Picross 3d, dammit.

PiChris.

Man, maybe it all works out in the game, but from this video, that megalines stuff in the new-ish mode looks like some major horseshit.

This seems like a huge step down from Picross 3D in every way, and I'm not even talking about the 3DS game.

Picross is the Game of the Year every year.

After playing a ton of both kinds, it struck me that there are 2 key differences between the 2D and 3D games.

The first is how they scale up in size. A 5x5x5 3D puzzle has about the same number of blocks as an 11x11 2D puzzle, and both fit on the screen just fine. A 7x7x7 3D puzzle is still a reasonably sized on a small screen, but has about the same number of blocks as an 18x18 2D puzzle (which is pretty unwieldy in my opinion).

The second (and maybe more important) difference is that the goals in 2D and 3D are opposites (additive vs subtractive). In 2D, your goal is "mark every square that IS filled." You can (and should) also be marking spaces that shouldn't be filled, but the core action is saying "filling in these squares makes a drawing of a dog."

In 3D, you have to mark everything that's NOT filled and remove it. You can (and again, should) mark blocks that you know have stuff, but ultimately your goal is to chip away all of the unnecessary cubes until you are left with a cool firetruck.

I used the dpad on the 3DS anyway because it helps with staying in lines, counting squares, etc.

@twolines: I really need to play any of the 3D Picross games, I don't have a 3ds or a WiiU so thats unfortunate. Hope at some point there will be a switch 3D Picross however.

@linkster7: Thanks duder, gonna check it out.

Dan's enthusiasm for these games is great.

I 100% Pokemon Picross without spending a cent and the puzzles Dan did are super easy.

Mega Picross was also in most of the "Picross E" eShop-only 3DS titles. It's never really clicked with me, but maybe I just need to keep trying? I'll do regular 2D/3D Picross for days, but Mega puzzles never really felt very fun or intuitive to me in the same way.

Micross, on the other hand, I loved: it involves you solving a ton of smaller individual puzzles to gradually fill in a very large picture, like a classical painting or something. I'm sort of bummed that that mode doesn't make an appearance here.

Did they say anything about mario and other nintendo puzzles like the ds version? God I hope they aren't locked with stupid amibos

Did you ever try that kenken game? I really have dug it a lot more than sudoku recently.

I love picross so much. 3ds is a better platform. with one hand on the dpad holding up and down while one hand uses the stylus.

But I will take whatever picross you have, Jupiter puts out the picross e games on the 3ds and they are great. 2d picross is my jam, (I like it more than 3d for some reason). and the switch may have a big enough screen, but picross using fingers isnt great.... I tried most of the android picross games and they are just not as good as having a dpad.

Oh. and people who like mega picross, it has appeared in previous picross e games. e5 definitely has them. I can;t remember if e6 has them and I have not bought e7,

@nodsknowingly: Oh, not at all, thanks for the suggestion! Looking it up right now.

RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, DESTINY RAID! Dan, Sir, you're priceless!

God I love logic puzzles too Dan. There were some good japanese collections on DS, they didn't have picross but had a lot of other classics. Oh and the Hexcellis games on pc are GREAT. I'm gonna have to boot up picross 3d again...

This should be free.

Seeing how awesome Picross 3d was, this kind of feels like a lazy cash grab.

The controls work, and the puzzles are still good, but that's pretty much all you can say about it.

The actual pictures you uncover are straight up bad. But i guess in the land of the blind, one eye is king.

Oh man, Picross 3D Round 2 was one of my favourite games last year, I love it.

On PC, I really recommend checking out the Hexcells series and Pictopix if you enjoy this type of game!

I keep hoping for an announcement for pictlogica final fantasy to hit 3ds over here.

I guess this is the end of the Picross e series on 3DS...

Have you checked out Paint it Back?

@beachthunder: That looks cool, will definitely check it out! Thanks for the recommendation.

i've never been a huge fan of non 3d picross, but the presentation seems pleasant and its only like 8 bucks

Mega Picross is definitely a cool twist. Dan just tried to look at that 9 group before he really could deduce anything about it. Mega-2 groups are often helpful because they can only have one shape and can be filled in as soon as you deduce either side of it.

I bought this game because more Picross, but really it's a pretty barebones package (I don't care about the touch controls part). Pokemon Picross was an amazing package by comparison, and anyone who hasn't played that should really give it a look.

@vinny The sidebar links to the Picross franchise page instead of the Picross S page.

Good quick look, this game is very fun! Though I don't think I'll be doing the Mega puzzles, like @kingschiebi said above the images don't change from the regular section and are just shuffled around so you can't guess which one is next.

Man, am I some kind of weirdo for always playing 2D Picross with buttons? Touch always seems like an unintuitive way to play this version of the game.

I haven't played a whole lot of Picross (though I really should) but I also played with the buttons. I just found it more comfortable.

This seems inferior to all the free Android versions I've played but I'll probably buy it anyway because I think it's cute when they reveal what the picture's supposed to be at the end.

Considering Jupiter released SEVEN 2d picross games on the 3DS eShop, yes they're continuing the cash grab. I expect Picross S2 within a year.

But I don't mind. I'm up to Picross e3 on my 3DS, and I'm just happy to know that there is always more picross waiting if I finish all the puzzles in the one I'm playing.

I find Picross 3d a lot more challenging, which means it is more rewarding but less relaxing. After a day of work, I'm more likely to jump in a 2D picross and mindlessly do a few puzzles to relax.

@warpr: yeah i get that. At the end of the day, it's just more puzzles, like how you would buy more sudoku puzzles if you enjoy doing them.

But it still bugs me that you know that they could have made a better product, but chose to not do that :(

@danryckert Unfortunately you're wrong that you never have to / never should guess in Picross. With small, simple puzzles like these, probably not, but for larger nonograms it's quite common to require exactly the method Vinny was suggesting: pick one possibility and move forward until you see if it leads to a contradiction or not. In some cases, actually, more than one of the guesses you could make will lead to a correct solution (but there's usually only one that ends up LOOKING right....)

'You should be able to deduce everything through logic'

- Words I never thought would be uttered by Dan Ryckert