Picross S (2017)

Something about this game tickles my lizard brain. Hours melt away while I sit in front of my TV just counting blocks and filling in squares, and I honestly have no idea why it's so addictive.

I suppose a lot of people enjoy Picross because your efforts counting and block-filling result in a little pixelated work of art, but I usually find myself not paying attention to the big picture at all when I'm playing. Why I love it, I guess, and why I think it's a great game for stress relief is that it distracts my brain from everything else in my life and all that's left in my head is the numbers.

(Speaking of the pictures, I love how random they are... "bone-in meat", "fried shrimp" to name a few that gave me a chuckle...)

As far as the software itself, there are a few reasons that I give it a 4 rather than a 5. This is mainly because game has two puzzle categories, regular Picross and Mega Picross, and the solutions (the final pictures) are exactly the same between the two of them. In my opinion, that's just lazy.

This complaint is pettier, but I also find the shade of blue used to fill in the squares unpleasantly bright. My eyes always had to adjust after starting up the game. I believe that in the later installments, the blue they use is less obnoxious though.

At any rate... I'm almost sad that I'm going to have to find something else to occupy my brain with now that I'm done with all the puzzles in this game.

I finished all of the main picross puzzles on this finally (no assist, no big deal). I had tried a little bit of the mega picross puzzles in the past and didn’t really like them. I thought I’d give them a whirl again just to see if they grabbed me, and I’m hooked now. I’ve cranked through 50 or so of them, and they’re way more interesting than I initially thought. I feel like I should start a YouTube channel like the cracking the cryptic people have, but instead of it being geniuses who solve impossible puzzles super fast, it would focus on mediocre picross puzzle solving, and lots of cursing when you have to restart.

I don’t exactly understand how jupyter cranks these out so cheap. Either they sell a ton of copies of these things, or they’re just easy to make. $7 or $8 doesn’t seem like enough for how much content you get in one of these games.