Picross DS game review

Nintendo for DS

A new collection of puzzles from Nintendo for DS, Picross is a game that you, as well as your mom and math teacher, should love. The puzzles in Picross come in the form of pictures hidden on a grid, and your job is to uncover those pictures one square at a time.

Most of Picross takes place on what looks like sheets of graph paper. You see a square made up of columns of smaller squares. The first puzzles, the easiest ones, take place on a graph that has rows and columns of 10 squares. Enjoy it while it lasts—the grids expand to 15 x 15 before too long.

THE NITTY GRITTY

Along the left and top sides of the grids are numbers. Single numbers, such as a 3 or 6, or a set of numbers, such as 3 2 3. This code tells you which squares within the grid should be filled in. Your job is to decipher this information.

As you solve a puzzle, you uncover a really ugly doodle of a bird or a fruit or a mailbox or some other simple design.

If you see a row with the number 10 beside it, and the grid has rows of 10 boxes, then you should fill in that complete row. If you see a row with the number 3, this tells you that you will fill in three boxes somewhere in that row. Which of the three blocks should you fill in? Ha! That’s where the brainwork comes in.

When you see sets of numbers, such as 3 2 3, you know that on this row you will fill in three squares, then two squares, then three more squares. There will be at least one blank space left between each of the sets of blocks.

Once you fill in the blocks correctly, you uncover a really ugly doodle of a bird or a fruit or a mailbox or some other simple design. You’re doing this on DS, remember, the dual-screen game system. You fill in blocks by tapping them with the stylus on the touch-sensitive bottom screen. When you finish, the screen on the top shows a small animation of the picture you have uncovered.

TIME IS EVERYTHING

If Picross let you solve puzzles at your own pace, the game would be too easy. Don’t worry—it doesn’t. Every puzzle in Picross is a race against the clock. You can still complete puzzles when you run out of time, but you don’t actually beat puzzles until you solve them in less than an hour.

Taking more than an hour to solve a puzzle doesn’t necessarily mean taking more than an hour. Remember, Picross is a game in which you tap squares to fill in blanks. Every time you tap a square that was supposed to remain empty, you have penalty minutes added to your time clock.

The first time you hit a wrong block, you get two minutes added to your score. The next time, four minutes are added to the clock. On your third error, you get eight minutes added and eight more for every mistake after that. Make a fifth mistake, and half of your hour disappears.

And herein lies one of the problems with DS—it doesn’t always read your cursor movements accurately. Maybe I got my finger too close to the touch screen, or I wasn’t as precise as I should have been when tapping the screen. Even then, I was sometimes penalized for mistakes I know I didn’t make. I solved several puzzles in five minutes, having made one or two mistakes, only to have 30, 40 or even 80 minutes showing on the timer.

A LITTLE STRATEGY

O.K., so you find yourself looking at a puzzle on a 15 x 15 grid and wonder where to start. Here’s the trick: Look for really big numbers and really small numbers. If the number along one of the rows is 0, you know you don’t need to fill in any of the boxes. If the number is 15, you know you need to fill in all of the boxes. If the number is 10, you know that you can start by filling in the five boxes in the center (since when two-thirds of the blocks in a row must be filled, the third in the middle will always be filled).

Eventually, you’ll find yourself solving puzzles with checkerboard patterns and other pitfalls that take real thought.

How’s that for a bit of Picross strategy?

After you fill in the big numbered rows and identify the empty rows, then comes the math and the logic. If the horizontal numbers say 1 6 1 and the vertical numbers have you drawing lines through the first and last boxes in the row, you should be able to create a good mental image of what that row will look like.

The more puzzles you solve, the more complex the patterns become. Soon, you find yourself solving puzzles with checkerboard patterns and other pitfalls that take real thought.

And then there’s the Free Mode in which you don’t get time penalties for making mistakes, but you’re not told what went wrong or where. The puzzles simply allow you to dink around until you finally fill in every box that needs filling and nothing more.

WRAP-UP

There’s a lot to like about Picross. The puzzles are fun and challenging. You can beat these puzzles if you put your mind to it, but it won’t always be easy.

Picross offers quite a few puzzles to solve. I counted 60 in regular play, and there are other modes with more puzzles and special challenges. In all, the game is fairly generous.

The problem is that once you solve the puzzles, it’s not so exciting to go back and solve them again. This is a game that you play all the way through, then loan to your friends.

Overall, however, Picross gets big thumbs up for having smart puzzles and lots of them. This is a game that makes you think, and anything that makes you think is good.