I'm not sure there are many people out there that have fully finished Picross e 1-9. Before the 3DS shop closure I purchased them on sale on a whim, having enjoyed Mario's Picross and Picross DS plenty but not really sure I'd get around to playing the series, let alone more than one entry. But it turns out there's a lot of opportunities throughout the day where rather than mindlessly scrolling through your phone you can do a puzzle or two... or a dozen, which seemed to be around my average. Right around the point I got halfway through the series I made it my mission to get through them all, and by the start of December 2025 I was done. Over the course of 3.42 years and 354 sessions I completed 2147 puzzles (22 of which were Micross sets [multiple puzzles]), spending 264 hours total. And what do I think about Picross as a whole?
I dunno—it's fun.
Trying to write an entry about Picross is like writing about Sudoku: what can you really say? It's a puzzle game where you have to mark pips on a board using numbers on the X and Y axes as your guide, and it's a pretty simple—but effective—mental exercise. All entries in the series start with 5x5 boards but gradually increase to 10x10 and 15x15, and starting from e4 you get super-wide 20x15 puzzles. For novice players you can get highlighted hints on where to start looking for pips to mark, and/or a random row & column pre-marked to serve as a springboard. You can also let the game correct you when you make a mistake at the cost of a time penalty, with your total time being the only kind of "scoring" the game has.
Early on I decided to turn all of those assist modes off, only keeping the gray-out indicator for when a row/column's pips have been completed. I tried playing without it for a micross puzzle, but felt there was too much number keeping busywork; you basically have to re-check your work every time you return to work on a row or column. It might be a less "authentic" way to play, but if it meant not having to re-count yet another "1 1 1 1 1" row, I'll gladly take it.
While the e series will give you more standard picross puzzles than you can shake a stick at, you'll also get micross puzzles starting in e2 and mega picross starting in e3. Micross has you solving 30+ 10x10 puzzles that come together to form a historical painting, and mega picross features "mega" numbers that extend over two lines. Of the two I vastly prefer mega picross; micross is basically a big time waster, as 50% of its puzzles are easily solved and those that aren't are just your typical 10x10 fare. Mega picross on the other hand is a delectable challenge, requiring a different mindset and new skills to deduce its hardest challenges. At first I didn't care for it compared to your regular nonogram challenge, but slowly I found it to be on par—if not better—due to the extra challenge it adds. The only downside is having to math out mega numbers larger than 12, as it can be very tedious work counting all the possibilities (16, 17, 18—wait, can a pip go there? Wait, what number was I at? 17?)
Ah, but I've saved the best feature to talk about for last: starting in e7, the player can use a second marker on the board! This is a massive improvement to the series, as you no longer have to use Xs while doing theoretical counts, saving you from any potential slip-ups. It's about as fundamental of a feature as being able to list possible numbers within a square in Sudoku, greatly speeding up your deductions thanks to how easy it is to plop pink squares down and then erase them in a single swipe. I've been playing the Twilight Princess Picross tie-in while writing this, and it has made me miss the feature dearly; more than once I've ruined a puzzle due to a rogue X that I forgot to delete while counting.
Besides those features, there's nothing that really separates one e title from another. The latter half of the series (from e6 onward) doubles the amount of available puzzles (from 150 to 300), but there's no distinctive or qualitative differences between the entries. Art and music is consistently adequate across the franchise and all games share similar difficulty curves. Namely, that the first 50 puzzles are a breeze but there are always ten or twenty sprinkled throughout that require an advanced level of skill to complete without guessing. Out of the 2000+ puzzles I played, only 43 puzzles took me over 20 minutes, and they weren't centralized to one particular game or era (though e8 was definitively my longest game). Because of this, there isn't really one game in particular that I recommend; I would say to grab e6/7/8 just for the addition of the second marker tool, but in Picross S+ every one of the e games gets that feature, so there's no wrong choice.
Out of all the simple logic games I've played, I think Picross will always remain my favorite. Part of it is a smidge of Nintendo brainwashing—I was a Nintendo kid until college after all—but another part is that I find it irresistibly charming. The sleek visuals, the pleasant tunes, the delightful sound effect each button emits, and the perfect amount of math involved keep me returning to the series again and again. Plus there's the fun little challenge where after a completion, you try and guess the picture you've made before the game tells you what it is 3 seconds later. Picross will never win any significant accolades from basically anybody, but it remains a treat worth appreciating, like the oft-forgotten after-dinner mint. Quaint and understated, but always entertaining and warmly welcomed.
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Images obtained from: ign.com, rawg.io,
Images obtained from: ign.com, rawg.io,
