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Picross DS Review - DS

Introduction

Puzzle games aren’t for everyone. What’s more, puzzle games that require actual thought (hint: the ones without the falling blocks) are for an even smaller proportion of the gaming population. But if you’ve even once found Sudoku to be mildly distracting, I’m telling you that you need to get Picross DS.

Gameplay

This is going to be hard to explain. Picross DS is Nintendo’s version of what are also known as ‘pixel puzzles’, ‘paint by numbers’, ‘nonograms’ or ‘Japanese crosswords’. So here’s the deal – it all starts with a grid. Easy puzzles will start off at around the five blocks by five blocks size, but you’ll eventually be tackling ones as large as twenty by twenty. On the left and top of the grid, numbers sit in the rows and columns. These tell you how many coloured squares lie in a row. For instance, a ‘2’ tells you that in that row, there is a pair of two coloured squares. More than one number along the side, such as ‘2 2’ tells you that there is a pair of two coloured squares, followed by an unspecified number of blank squares, followed by another pair of two coloured spaces. In a grid of five by five, there is obviously only one formation that this can occur in – two coloured, one blank, and then the other two coloured. You’ve filled the row.

You follow?

Okay, now consider a single ‘3’ alongside a row of a five by five grid. That means that there are three coloured blocks in a row. Visualise having a 3x1 block at your fingertips in a 5x1 row. It can be anywhere in that row. However (if you’re good at visualising), you may have realised that regardless of where it sits in that row, the very central block is always coloured. In other words, no matter where you slide those coloured blocks, in a grid five spaces wide, a three-piece block will always cover the third space of those five.

Still with me?

Try this one: in a larger grid of ten by ten, there are no guaranteed positions to where ‘2 2’ can be. Visualise sliding a two lots of blocks along a longer row – there’s no way you can be sure that there’s a coloured block in any one square. How do you work out the puzzle, then? You cross reference with the vertical columns to fill in squares. Bit by bit, as you deduce the position of coloured squares, you flick between rows and columns to fill the grid so that it satisfies the requirements of the numbers on both sides.

However, colouring in squares isn’t your only form of attack. You also have crosses at your disposal. It might be helpful to think of these as the opposite of colouring in a square. You put a cross in a square if you’re absolutely certain it cannot be coloured in. If we return (continued next page)