Merry Christmas! And Happy New Year in advance!

This holiday I have a big chunk of time free that I should be using to try something long and complicated. Instead I’m doing Picross puzzles instead. After the runaway success I had with Picross 3D earlier this year and with Color Cross wow has it really been that long ago, I’ve been meaning to revisit the original, and the time just happened to be right. I wanted to see how far I could get, because I quit really early the first time I tried it. The 5×5 puzzles were easy, the 10×10 were barely doable, but from 15×15 onwards, I was just lost.

Having built up experience playing the other games, this time round was slightly different. Probably the most significant difference was that I threw away my foolish pride and used the Hints roulette all the way through. I also took my time, thought a lot about the puzzles and didn’t throw up my hands at the first sign of trouble, so I made it pretty far.

Compared to the other two though, Picross DS isn’t that much fun. Once you get even a little way into the Normal Mode puzzles, the clues all become like “1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1” and stuff like that. Just horrible. The game tells you that “Every puzzle can be solved using logic without resorting to guesswork” but of course they’re going to say that, it’s their game. Also navigating the larger, zoomed-in puzzles is a clumsy affair, so the ease of movement 3D spoiled me with is completely gone.

The only real advantage Picross has over the other games is that the finished puzzles actually look like what they’re supposed to look like. Even then it’s not 100%, especially for the Level 4+ puzzles. Also it scratches my Picross/Picross-related itch. I’m still not a puzzle/logic game fan, but I do crave simpler, more mindless experiences sometimes. So I haven’t quit Picross yet, though I’ve abandoned many of the more annoying puzzles, and I’ll probably be playing it for a long time to come.

Having said that, I actually didn’t set out to play Picross on my DS. I was going to play something “proper,” clearing up the last few DS games I hadn’t tried yet. However I tried Solatorobo and Soma Bringer in quick succession and neither game really ‘clicked’ with me, so I gave up in despair and Picross was the result. With Soma Bringer, I think I might try again this weekend, but the battle system in Solatorobo just put me off. I am reliably informed that I can win every battle just by mashing A, but I fail to see the fun in that. Not to mention the platforming elements are just tedious so, yeah it’s dropped. Now that I come to think of it, I haven’t played a romance/otome game in a while, so maybe I should do one of those instead. Hmm, decisions, decisions. Well, I’ll figure something out.