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.

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.

Well it's picross so it scratches that itch with it's typical addicting gameplay, but the rest is quite underwhelming. I prefer the sleek and clean look of Picross 3D and the cutesy Kemono Friends picross over this game's drab stone aesthetic. Also despite being called "Mario's Super Picross", pretty much none of the pictures you complete are related to mario in any way. It's nice that a few of the pictures are animated at least. It's unrelated to the game's quality but it surprised me that nintendo was too lazy to translate the tiny amount of japanese dialogue in this game, meaning any english-speaker playing this as their first picross will be unable to learn the rules. It's not a bad game by any means, but without the style to back it up I don't have the motivation to go through more than the 100+ puzzles I completed to sate my picross craving.

In what's starting to look like a very old and persistent trend with Nintendo Picross games, many of the puzzles in this game commit the cardinal sin of forcing players to do guesswork. I ran into this problem in the DS games and I'm disappointed to find they've been making this mistake for (seemingly) years. Sure the rewind feature on Switch mitigates the time penalty basically completely, but I guess I just expected tighter logic from a "deduction game".

Also, put a podcast or your music on while playing because there's only one good song in the whole game. The rest range from middling to annoying.

This game is the sleeper hit of the SNES Online games on the Nintendo Switch. Super Mario World has been released countless times. I've played it on the Super Nintendo, the Wii, the 3ds, the SNES Mini, and the Switch. Everyone knows about it. More people should know about and play Mario's Super Picross. This game makes me want to scream in delight at its sounds, puzzles, and art. Seriously, Picross is good, and this is a good Picross!

This is 4 stars instead of 5 because most of the pictures were unrelated to Mario, which is bad because there's so much good Mario art in this game!

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%.

This game became my first real foray into Picross after a streamer I followed got really into it (Many years ago I tried playing Pokemon Picross on the 3DS but couldn't really understand it). The music is pleasing, the art is fun, and picross is a really fun game to play!

My one complaint is that the time limit on the Mario levels add a large and frankly unneeded amount of stress to this otherwise relaxing game. It can get especially annoying in the later levels, where the picross grids are absolutely massive.