The real vaccine is the friends we made along the way.

This game is pretty crazy, color picross + minesweeper. There's a story mode where you engage with a given character, and the images the picrosses create follows the narrative of each character. The characters are all pretty cute and their stories are nice, too.

Mechanically, this game is pretty sinful. It occasionally breaks the one rule of picross: on very few puzzles you have to guess where to put a certain tile. Although, you can make an educated guess based on multiple factors, including the patterns that you've built thus far. The kicker is, you fail out of the whole stage if you make 5 wrong calls. There were a few 20x20+ puzzles where I ended up making my 5th mistake over 30 mins into the stage, it's quite punishing. Additionally, on the story levels, you have to solve the puzzle within a certain amount of time. I think I only timed out on like two or three stages though. Either way, all these aspects can make for tense and somewhat infuriating times. Maybe the amount of errors allowed should have been increased with puzzle size. Be it on a 5v5 puzzle or a 30x20 puzzle, you are only allowed 4 mistakes before it fails you and you have to restart the whole thing.

Also they should have let you customize the music and character when you do the non-story puzzles. This game has some good music but for some reason you're stuck with the same one for the ~50 nonstory puzzles. I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first picross game. I think it's a good exception to the standard one, though. Also you don't need to know japanese to play it, but I'd say like half the fun or so comes from the characters and their arcs.

In short, it's picross meets minesweeper.

That is to say, that although the premise and goal is identical to that of all the picross games you've played already, there is one major twist: when you successfully fill in the correct color of a square, the game clues you in on its surrounding squares (excluding diagonals), with a number of 0-4 indicating how many neighboring squares are the same color. This is the minesweeper element - sort of in reverse though, since the clues lead you to squares you're meant to click rather than avoid.

Why does the game need that? Well on top of things, the color clues are actually fundamentally different from your typical picross fare as well; the order of colored sequences isn't implied by the clues, only the number of squares present in the row/column for each color. This makes the game more challenging while maintaining the picross feel, something I personally appreciated.

The game is in Japanese only, I think? So it may be difficult to navigate the game's menus which are already a bit unconventionally laid out. But I feel like giving this game some active credit, since it's one of the few picross games I've encountered that genuinely innovates on the genre. At least, it's the first I've played that has either of the two mechanics I described, and the 2001 release date makes me believe that it might have started the ideas.

To my knowledge, the game's puzzle reach up to 30x20 size, which is pretty considerable given the challenge added by new mechanics.

If you can overcome the language hurdle, give it a go!