About three months ago I started playing nothing but Picross on my Switch, whether that's a sign of me losing interest in the system or me growing older is up for interpretation. Essentially my version of when my grandma played crossword puzzles for hours as she watched Monday Night Raw, except I'm playing Picross as I'm catching up with NXT. I could theoretically be playing Picross until the next ice age considering how much of it there is, but regardless...

Mario's Super Picross may as well be training from hell in preparation for the easy shit in the S Series. When I was a Picross rookie I used to think the stuff in Genesis/Master System edition were hard, but then Wario came along and slapped me in the face with shit that took me upwards of an hour to figure out, and now I'm the Picross Pope. You know what though? Good for him, Wario's a chill motherfucker with his lack of time limit and not breaking my fingers if I mark an incorrect space like that asshole Mario, who flat out expects me to have that shit on his desk by 5 o'clock sharp with a finger smashing mallet in his hands.

I'm not sure I quite like it as much as the first game on Game Boy, I don't think it's as cute, but I absolutely wouldn't be averse to playing that one again if it shows up on NSO, but alas Nintendo already wants to give us random shovelware titles on Game Boy, so who knows when the hell that will show up. Probably Christmas of next year if we're lucky, hopefully along with Picross 2 that I only knew existed like a few weeks ago.

Mario's Super Peakcross.

I'm not entirely sure what else to put here, but I will say that a few months ago I started trying to learn Japanese characters again and it was pretty cool when I could recognize them in here.

Mario's Super Picross was my first Picross game ever, and my first impressions were nothing short of magical. I got hooked immediately, and in a summer full of boring Zoom classes, mental health issues and a general sense of ennui and listlessness I sought an escape from, Mario's Super Picross was it. I grinded through so much of the game and loved every bit of it.

To quote my initial review:

"this is potentially one of the best games on the nintendo switch library

i cannot imagine my life before picross anymore."

... But that was one year ago. I've finished this game just five minutes ago (as of this writing), and my feelings have shifted quite considerably.

The first thing I have to say is that Mario's Super Picross is one of very few games I've played where I can confidently say there's far too much content. Time after time, I've cleared out levels and modes thinking "wow, that was hard! I think that's about all that this game can throw at me."
And I was wrong, time and time again. The game has 300 whole puzzles, and the later ones can easily take up anywhere from thirty minutes to an entire hour to solve.

My total clocked time was over ninety hours, and... I think that's far too much. I doubt I've played some games I unabashedly love, games I tell myself I could go back to time and time again, for as long.
And I don't unabashedly love this game. The difficulty spike peaks, being extremely generous, around puzzle 250, and I'd say anything past 200 is honestly excessive already.

I'll take a tangent real quick and note that for a game simultaneously titled Mario's Super Picross and Wario's Super Picross, there's a noted lack of Mario and Wario here. Finding Wario's EX puzzles was a breakthrough moment for me in terms of what I think Picross is capable of, and it's a shame that it was so underutilized.

Wario's EX puzzles are written from his point of view, describing Mario's M emblem as "Bad Guy Mark", and describing his W as a "Hero's Mark", among other things - the sheer implication that these puzzle titles are written from the characters' point of view could have made for really fascinating exploration of characters, potentially even telling a story through overarching themes across puzzle descriptions (if any of you reading this decide to make a Picross game based on this concept - hi, I'm a composer looking to write music for video games! ...wait, i should actually bring this up to a friend who actually considered making a picross game).

Mario's Super Picross ultimately explores so very little about this concept, and only at the very tail end of the game. It's extremely disappointing.

So what you have left is an addictive, bloated game that doesn't do anything special. Its biggest draw is being a game that lets you live out the satisfaction of almost infinitely seeing boxes get checked.

"'Video games are bad for you'? That's what they said about rock and roll," said Shigeru Miyamoto once. But Picross might be the one (series of) game I've played that I'd be tempted to describe as "bad for you".

At least, to a certain kind of individual in a certain time. Maybe Mario's Super Picross gave me a kind of reprieve from my listlessness, from the boredom from my online classes - but it never solved anything. It let me so thoroughly escape that it took me arguably too long to truly admit to myself that I was in a position in life that I absolutely did not want to be in, and to go about changing that for myself.

I think the game was added to Nintendo Switch Online at simultaneously the best and worst time possible. It was a time when many people had much less to do, and could use a timesink of a distraction... but also a time where I'd argue that that's likely probably the worst thing a lot of people could have been doing at the time.

It's really funny, actually. I find the concept of Picross a bit too questionable to think this game deserves a high score, but I love the concept of Picross and its potential far too much to give this game an actually low score.

It's a great paradox of a game. I'll never forget it.

This game tricked me.

I like Picross, so I thought I'd plow through this on the SNES NSO app. But each time I thought I had finished it, it said "SURPRISE, MORE LEVELS YOU FILTHY PICROSS ADDICT" and I just sighed and accepted my fate.

This game took me 30 hours to complete. That final batch of Wario levels was absurdly difficult, and even after THAT, there are secret surprise levels hidden in a new version of the game's main menu! It's a fine Picross game, but there are plenty of better choices out there.

I kind of wish the Switch Online app told me how much time I spent on this game because man, it kept me entertained for ages! But ultimately I have to admit that there’s a point where even if the game is great my poor number hating brain goes “fuck all this counting, man, I don’t know what’s going on here. Please, let’s stop.” For me it happened around unlocking Wario Ultra and trying those puzzles.

I don’t really consider that a huge knock against the game’s quality though since there’s a whole lot of puzzles to get through before that point. There’s more content for the real picrossheads out there! I can be sated with what I have.

My one actual criticism is not enough actual Mario content. I feel like the old school Mario sprites would’ve made great Picross puzzles, but at the same time I think this game came out at that weird point in time when the NES Mario sprites were too new to be nostalgic and not new enough to be cool. There were some new hotness Wario Land enemies, at least, and the art that is included is very charming, especially when it comes with animations. I don’t know, maybe there’s more Mario content in Wario Ultra but like, I’m kinda done, honestly… which is kind of a shame, because it’s the perfect game to play for a bit when your Switch battery is <15%.

Is Picross a game? Or is it a coloring book for The Count?

I've picked at Picross games a few times over the years, and each time follows a similar pattern. I get lost in time. It feels like fun. But the more I play and the better / faster I get, the less it feels like a game. The more victory feels assured instead of earned. That completion becomes an inevitable mark of patience instead of a reward for cleverness.

Picross strips all pretenses that other games hinge upon. Player action is the only action that can happen. There are no surprises. Everything is presented up front and fair. The greatest penalty is lost time.

There's an awareness that develops in the rhythm of how these puzzles can and must progress. That complexity doesn't increase difficulty, only the tediousness of careful counting and eye-spying changes from my previous choices. That mistakes and failures come from basic arithmetic errors or misreading a 6 for an 8. That the greatest obstacle possible is the functioning of my own brain.

Once I reach this state, the fun stops. I feel like I'm using myself to mine bitcoin for the dopamine hit of finishing a puzzle, dressed up in gamification to feel like a video game level. I stop feeling like a human doing a human thing. I feel like a machine pantomiming a rudimentary concept of how to have fun.

I dunno man. There's something sinister and existential there. Picross feels like the one line of code in the Matrix of video games I've been able to read. Because Picross reveals exactly what’s happening and why you’re doing what you’re doing exponentially faster than most games. Because the steps you must take are preset and the greatest reward the game can give is more of itself. More time spent engaging your brain in a way that doesn't require language or emotion. More time spent honing a non-transferable way of thinking that only enables More Of This.

I can't help but think of the people who turn Pokémon games into mindless casino machines for literal hundreds of hours. Picross is the condensed version of that, without asking for the emotional investment in Pikachu as a down payment. An invitation to roleplay in losing your humanity without the veneer of an external reason for doing so. This is not a club, this is a crack house.

More recent Picross games have been friendlier in presentation, more cheerful in tone. They are liars and cowards. Mario's Super Picross's opening screens have the sound and ambiance of a horror game. As far as game cover art goes, this one might be perfect. Mario, the mascot of fun in games itself, staring into your soul as he pixelates into cold, blank numerology, while wildly discordant colorful foreign text fails to package this nightmare as a Good Time.

I can't score this.

 Mario's Super Picross is a nonogram game with Mario-themed menus, available through Nintendo Switch Online's service in its original Japanese locale. If you know how to solve nonograms, though, there's no language barrier—just a small cultural one on a few of the puzzles, perhaps. See, only the menus really have anything to do with Mario, and even then it almost has the same gunky bootleg-esque visuals as the edutainment Mario games that Interplay and The Software Toolworks were developing around that time. Once you're actually doing the puzzles, all of that Mario stuff falls away in favor of a brown, serious, rigid, and somewhat scholastic aesthetic. Even the music reflects the change, preferring an anxious "test-taking" kind of tune over the kind of upbeat and melodic stuff we associate with our silly plumber friend. The puzzles themselves are fine, as it's hard to really screw up nonograms, but it's a shame just how limited the theming really is here.

 It's also missing a lot of the modern quality of life conveniences that come with more recent games in Jupiter's Picross series: you won't find advanced technique tutorials, count assistance, or the ability to mark spaces with circles—just crosses. Because of that, and also because players will need to know some tricks in later levels that the game doesn't outright teach, I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first Picross game (despite the puzzles appearing to skew to the easier side overall). Still, there's really nothing wrong with this one, and I'd recommend it to fans of the series who haven't picked it up yet—provided they aren't too married to the sleek Y2K aesthetic of Jupiter's recent output.

Let it be known I completed every single puzzle in this game. All 300 of them. 87 grueling hours.

This game was my personal demon. Each time I thought I had finished it for good, it came back with more puzzles and a swift, painful kick to my ribcage. I am fully convinced the final levels of this game were originally designed as some kind of MKUltra-like test of mental endurance and simply stuck into this game by accident.

But I did it. Kiss my ass, Mario's Super Picross. May you burn in hell where you belong.

I finally finished this one. There were 300 puzzles total, and it just kept going and going and going, far more than I expected, but hey! It was 300 picross puzzles, so, great.

There were ones in the last few sets that were actually hard, where you have to start trying to predict, and that's not my favorite. Picross should never have guessing involved.

But! In the Wario puzzles, the last option in the menu yellows out blocks, like using a pencil, and if you select the left option when you are done, it completes them for you. Select the right option, it'll undo all your moves.

Now you’re probably gonna wonder to yourself: ‘whu, why are you doing a review on this game?’ And before you ask no, it’s not because I’ve run out of good ideas and games to talk about, it’s because I wanted to dedicate about 5 minutes of my time to talk about quite possibly one of the best variations and only variation I have played of a picross game.

This game wasn’t originally released in the west due to the last Mario picross game not doing too well. Eventually it would come over here (Europe) on the wii virtual console but I just played it on the switch like most people. My first session with the game started as a ‘oh I’ll play it for 10 minutes and move onto something else’. This ‘10 minute session’ turned into 30 minutes and then 60 minutes and then before I knew it I had spent 2 hours playing the game. It was just that fun I couldn’t get enough of it.

Overall, I still come back to this game often and find myself enjoying it the more I keep taking breaks and playing. Eventually I might try the other picross games but who knows.

I like picross now, spent wayyyyy too long on this game, love it to bits

it's just hilarious to me that this game was played on a tv console back when it was released, when this would be a mobile game if released new today. it's as if i'd turn on my ps4 to play merge mansion

what i like about this compared to most modern picross games is that the game doesn't directly tell you if you have all the squares marked right, you gotta keep an eye out yourself that you actually got all the 2s in the 2 2 2 2 2 row, etc. because like, some picross games make it inherently easier for you by automatically marking the numbers you already got and/or by automatically X'ing out the blank ones in the row if you have technically completed it. i like the extra challenge of having to check my work lol

This was my first Picross game. Everything is in Japanese, so the first few minutes were confusing, but I figured it out. I started this to pass the time & take my mind off things and I've been playing for like 60 hours since.

I got through the Mario levels really quickly, and it was a fun enough experience on its own. But I've been playing through the Wario levels for months now, and as tedious as they can be sometimes, I think they're more my speed. I like being able to take my time on a level. The challenge of deducing where the right squares are without feedback is addictive. It can be frustrating if they don't give you an obvious starting point, but once you get in the groove, you can typically find your own through a little trial-and-error.

Almost none of the pictures have anything to do with Mario, but it's still fun seeing what they make at the end. My favorite feeling is having no clue what the puzzle is depicting until the very second you finish it. I'm definitely picking up other Picross games when I'm done with the Wario levels.

It's picross. That's the long and the short of it.

The Mario theming didn't seem to play into it very much, I did 5 of Mario's levels and I don't think any of the pictures were Mario-related.

I do think there could be some quality of life things, like when you've cleared a row it could auto-mark the rest as X and highlight the letters in red so you didn't need to do that yourself every single time because that just slows it down for me. Obviously that wouldn't work in the Wario stages, but I think it'd be fine for the Mario ones.

My plan is to hopefully complete this slowly over time because trying to play it as a normal games gets too repetitive.

Deeply dislike the effect this game has on my brain. I’ll start playing it and look up and it will be an hour later and I’ll have no real concept of what I’ve even done within that hour other than check boxes, and I will just have lost all sense of time passing. The way in which this game just destroys any concept of time is kind of a horrifying sensation.

I used to play a ton of Picross years ago, and wonder if my relationship with it was maybe addiction-adjacent. I don’t find these games particularly fun, mentally engaging, challenging or nourishing, but my brain is drawn to them and struggles to put them down anyways. Had to force myself to stop playing this game, and I suspect I'll be avoiding other Picross games from now on now I'm more aware of the effect it has on me.

That said, even outside of how much it kind of breaks me, I don't even think this is a particularly good Picross game. It lacks a lot of quality of life features found in more modern iterations, some of the music is pretty irritating, and in the half of the game I completed it didn't provide a single puzzle that actually took advantage of the Mario IP.