I honestly didn't realize how many picross games were on the phone, and even more shocked that Konami actually made one. Even more than that though, the game has very little ad time, and doesn't interrupt the game for it either. It's earnestly a game that just reminds you that Konami made games with it's picross puzzles, and in game advertising for various steam and mobile games. It does have an annoying feature to time puzzles, but really it's only for one type anyway so it's not on the same level that Pokemon Picross (3DS) was when it came to wasting your time.

Still Pixel Puzzle Collection is a solid Picross game that borders on the easy side of Puzzle games. While most of the puzzles are 15x15; a lot of the time the game auto fills completed rows for you, gives heavy easy edge combos, and true combos to make solving puzzles relatively easy. The game even has a small soundtrack accompanying the puzzles from said collection, like Castlevania or Gradius. Then when you solve each puzzle completely, as sometimes you need to do multiple picrosses, you get a full description of what you just made.

Basically this game is super neat and super free. Honestly, it feels like a fever dream when you take into account the bad habits of Konami as of the 2010s mixed together with how common place mobile games use their ads to annoy you to buy "the full game". If you got a phone capable of playing it, love picross and old Konami games, it's sort a huge win.

I think this sort of criticism almost sounds unfair, but this game just has too much content. Optional content, mind you. Stuff normal people (not me) would just ignore. Basically, to truly complete this game, you have to play the whole thing over again without the ability to mark empty spaces with crosses. Considering how many boring subway commutes this game helped me through, I guess I can hardly complain, but I think a few side modes à la the Picross series would have been a much better fit. As it is, the sheer monotony of it all had me relish in the thought of finally being done more than that of just playing the game by the end.

I love a good picross game. This is almost that.

A touch too easy, and with an obnoxious timer on the boss puzzles that meant I had finished every single other puzzle with a HUGE amount of those left over. A completely needless feature, as the post-game catalogue (including some bonus puzzles) removes the timer entirely. A very Konami move, and I’m shocked you can’t pay your way past it. Not that I’d want to, it’s just… Konami, y’know?

An excellent argument for turning off your wifi once in a while, too, as the many adverts for other Konami games only actually attempt to appear of you’re connected, and their very presence isn’t just obnoxious, but actually impacts performance.