(Review) Picross Touch

I’ve enjoyed many a different Picross games in the past. I’ve even got a few versions on my 3DS currently. It can be rather frustrating at times when you mess up and my Co-Op partner mentioned not appreciating it as he watched me play. He also said he may download it just to try and beat my times. Does the Steam version continue to be as worthy of my time or is it a simple free to play game that tries to pull you in only to squeeze some money out of you? Let me break it down for you.

So many stinking puzzles to do… maybe in a few years…

First up, I guess there may be some of you that have not played a Picross game before so I’ll briefly try to explain it. You’re given a 5×5 up to a 25×25 sized grid and there are numbers all along two  edges of the board. Those number indicate what amount of squares should be filled in, in any given row, but it don’t tell you which ones. If there is a “5” on a 5×5 grid, you would fill that whole row or column in. If there is a “4” on the same grid, you know that 4/5 of those are filled in, but you can’t know from just that information where it starts or ends. You can infer that the middle three are filled in because while you can’t tell where it starts and ends, the line of four has to cross all three middle spaces no matter where you place it. You’ll be using this and other techniques to fill out the rest of the board.

This puzzle may look simple with this much filled out, but it gave me a lot of trouble to get up to this point. (I did finish it).

It obviously gets harder when you add more squares to the mix. A 25×25 board will give you a lot more trouble than a 10×10 depending on the picture they are painting. You’ll be drawing Creeper faces and Mario’s head and I’ve even completed one puzzle that made a skeleton. (You can expect a lot of generic 1-9’s on the 5×5’s player-made puzzles from all of the people just making one for the achievements.) The neat part is that even when you finish all 366 of the games given puzzles, there is the Workshop option as well where you can make your own Picross puzzles. Other players have submitted thousands of 5×5 to 25×25 puzzles to keep you going if you just can’t stop. I’m not sure I’ll be sticking around to finish all 5800+ puzzles, but I’ll stick it out to complete about 2000… because achievements. It’s not something that needs to be done, but it’s something I can just keep coming back to. I’m not going to grind it out in a day or so, but it’s something I will complete.

This may come off as just a simple puzzle game. Well that’s it isn’t it? All it is a puzzle game, pure and simple and I really do enjoy the formula of Picross and this not only scratches that itch with its basic modes of easy, medium and hard, but Picross Touch also includes a crap-ton of other player-created puzzles for me to work through. If it’s one thing you’d want in a puzzle game you’re enjoying, it’s for it not to end. Picross Touch does that in spades. If you are a fan of puzzle games and Picross Touch sounds interesting, you really have nothing to lose since it’s free and doesn’t try to milk any money out of you. If you’ve not heard of Picross before, but hate Sudoku, you may want to try out the easy and medium puzzles, but I may say hold off on the larger ones until you grasp the basics because it will probably make you want to punch a kitten and that’s just mean. There are some good brain sit-ups to be had here.

Further Reading on Picross Touch: Official Page / Steam / Twitter


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