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.

While my favorite puzzle game is Tetris, an extremely close second has always been Nintendo’s Picross series. I was introduced to the series through the My Nintendo Exclusive game Zelda Picross, which I played through again earlier this year. While that game is fun and polished, it’s extremely short. That game has about 50 ish puzzles, whereas Super Picross has 280. This number is just insane to me. The mechanics of the game feel super nice, while it isn’t as forgiving, it’s also very free form. For the Mario mode, you get autocorrected if you get something wrong, although it takes a bit off the timer. For the Wario mode, you don’t get autocorrected and it’s a race finish as fast as possible, with no time limit. The music is quite catchy and the game feels super chill to play. I’m honestly really glad I was just randomly scrolling through SNES NSO one day to see a Japanese Exclusive Mario Picross I didn’t recognize. This game is super fun and I’m having a great time playing through it.

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.

It's Picross. There's nothing much to say about the game itself. I personally think it's a timeless puzzle design comparable to something like Tetris.

I'm more surprised at how much content is here for a Super Famicom game. I solved all 132 main puzzles (not the Wario ones), and I clocked in at least 9 hours.
The one thing that really bugged me about this was the repetitive music. For a game that involves staring at the same screen for about 10 minutes, it's kinda annoying to have only 3 different music tracks playing on loop. This is one of those games that I would always keep muted or listen to a podcast on the side.

Otherwise, it's solid.

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.

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.

 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.

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.