This is a game I got for free via the My Nintendo service aaaages ago (like, 8 years, according to my 3DS' time log XD) back when they still did gold points for games from time to time. I've had it sitting half-finished in my 3DS for ages, and after doing Super Mario's Picross a few weeks back, I figured why not go through and finally finish this off as well. It took me a total of 38 hours, according to my activity log, to beat all(?) 256 puzzles in the game.

Mario's Picross is one of Nintendo's first attempts to get Picross popular outside of Japan, and it didn't really catch on. That said, it's still a fine Picross game. It has 264 puzzles of 5x5, 10x10, and 15x15 sizes. 64 are beginner "Easy" Picross, then there's the larger and more difficult Mushroom and Star rank puzzles of which there are 64 each. These are standard puzzles where you have a 30 minute time limit and errors are corrected and subtract from your time. Then, when you beat all of those three sets, you unlock Time Trial mode.

Time Trial mode has you playing without error corrections and no time limit (like Wario's puzzles in the Super Famicom game), but with a bit of a twist. There is no level select for Time Trial mode. You just get another selected puzzle from the set of 64. I actually wasn't counting, and there's no way to know if you've actually done them all, but I played a LOT of time trial mode and eventually the puzzles started repeating, so I assume I've beaten them all? XD . At any rate, they very confusingly rank your best times against one another and you can enter your initials, which is pretty weird given some of those puzzles are much easier than others, so ranking the times against each other has no real point, but the random assortment (picked from the list of 64 of ones you haven't done yet) does give this a good deal of replayability if it's all you've got for a long car ride.

The downsides of this really come down to its age and its platform. For starters, the most obvious problem is that this is still in the age before the numbers you'd filled in were filled out automatically. What's even worse is that unlike the Super Famicom game, you can't even cross out those numbers yourself, so it's all counting in your head. Given that the biggest puzzles are 15x15, that isn't SUCH a huge problem, but it's still a pain. Then beyond that the limitation of the GameBoy's resolution meaning 15x15 is as big as the puzzles get is a little disappointing, but it's not a really big deal, and it helps the games go faster too.

The presentation is fine. There are a good assortment of puzzles of Mario things as well as all sorts of other objects (from the Grim Reaper to a Mario Mushroom to even a sake jug with the kanji for "sake" written on the side XD). There are no animations on the finished puzzles like the Super Famicom game, but that's really to be expected. The music is also not amazing and really forgettable, but it's Picross, so you could really always put on your own music or a podcast these days.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The lack of QoL features compared to more modern Picross games makes this more of a difficult game to recommend than the SFC game. It's a good puzzle game for the GameBoy, but you're probably better off just going with a more modern Picross game given how cheap they are on the Switch (or even on your phone) compared to what you'll have to pay for this game. It's not a bad game, but age and the popularity of Picross haven't been very kind to this otherwise quite solid entry in digital puzzledom.

It's lacking a lot of the convenient quality of life flourishes in most modern Picross games, and it's never particularly difficult, but there's something extremely charming about its breezy gameplay fitting perfectly in a handheld format. I played through this over the course of a month on an emulation handheld, and booting up to an autosave and doing a puzzle or two each night before bed was a perfect way to unwind.

It's doing absolutely nothing new with the formula, but if you like Picross, you'll like this.

I never heard about picross before. I found out about it here on Backloggd and got interested, so I played this. It's a solid puzzle game.

I got addicted when I started playing it because I loved right away the concept of picross. The game does an amazing job teaching you how to play it and overall is very easy. This game is divided in three sections of 64 levels each: easy, less easy and medium. Don't expect a challenge.

Each level has to be completed in under thirty minutes and every mistake takes some minutes away from the timer. If I'm not mistaken, you can make up to four mistakes because the fifth takes all the time left. It's an interesting concept to make the game less boring and it worked well for me.

The main problem is the screen. It ended up being compact to fit all the numbers and the 15x15 grid, which can make it a bit harder to play properly. Also, they should've added a small grid for the numbers in front of the rows, it would be much appreciated.

There's not much else to say I think. It's a cool puzzle game but I'm sure there are better ways to play picross than on a Game Boy. I had a good time and only recommend Mario's Picross if you're curious about it.