Picross DS Review (DS)

Picross DS, like any great puzzle game, burns itself into your mind, forcing you to see grids 24 hours a day. While kissing your boyfriend or girlfriend. Grids. Sleeping. Grids. Scrubbing your naughty bits. Grids. This is perfectly normal, the result of a game that over stimulates the brain, much like Tetris, Lumines and Sudoku.

These puzzles, otherwise known as nonograms, present you with a grid. A picture resides amongst the empty blocks, and you must uncover it by filling them in, paying close attention to the numbers along the top and left side of the grid (denoting horizontal and vertical rows and columns, respectively). If, for example, you see a 10X10 grid and the number ten sits atop the first vertical column, you'll fill in all ten blocks. At the same time, you need to watch the horizontal row, because if the first number you see is one, and you just filled in ten vertical blocks, then you already placed that one block, and can mark the rest of that horizontal row with Xs, which in turn gives you clues about the rest of the puzzle.

Naturally, things get a lot crazier. Instead of seeing ten in that vertical column, you'll come across one, two, three, which means you'll mark one square, then two squares in a row and finally three squares in a row, with an empty space (or X) in between each set of numbers (one, space, two, space, three). Marking these blocks proves tricky, because you must take into account the entire puzzle, and not just a single row or column. Each puzzle has a time limit, and each wrong answer adds precious minutes to the clock. Nintendo gives you 60 minutes to solve a puzzle, so there's no rush, especially with the much larger ones, which are so big, you need to utilize a zoom function and move from one side of the grid to the other.

Similar to crossword puzzles, Picross has a much slower burn than the standard block falling games. Nintendo and its developer, Jupiter, want you to sit and fret over a single puzzle for an hour or more. You'll get lucky from time to time, guessing out of sheer frustration, but the penalty for incorrect answers will make you think twice about going for some random block. With that, Picross separates itself from most puzzle games, offering a refreshing change of pace.

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