Picross games and fakeout endings, name a more iconic duo

I don't get why this wasn't released! It's an accessible, friendly first Picross game which could have turned plenty of young Pokemaniacs into Picross addicts. The art is the clear highlight, with each image being quite lovely, especially for the hardware, and the Pokemon theming gives the game plenty of charm. There are 151 puzzles that you'll complete in the main game, one for each Pokémon (at the time). If you complete a puzzle, that Pokémon is added to your Pokédex, and the puzzle is marked with a Poké Ball. However, if you beat the puzzle under the target time, it's marked with a Great Ball instead. Is there any real reason to go for Great Balls on all of them? Not as far as I can tell! I came in under the target time on every single puzzle, and I'm unsure if anything in the game changed as a result. Probably not worth all the retries!

Throughout these 151 puzzles, I feel comfortable saying this is an entry-level Picross game. Nothing is too difficult, largely due to the small resolution of the Game Boy. This means that you won't encounter any puzzles larger than 15x15, though the game does fake its way to 20x20 and 30x30 pictures by splitting those images into 4 quadrants, essentially just being a group of 10x10 or 15x15 puzzles that must be completed in a row. It keeps things quite simple, but they definitely did the best they could with the hardware limitations. Though there is one adjustment made by the dev team that might be controversial; instead of actually drawing the pixels in the images, you're sort of highlighting over the lines in broad strokes, allowing for more detailed stills. You can see in this image how there are black lines underneath the dark blue filled squares. This does end up causing a LOT more completely filled-in rows than your average Picross game, but again, I think it works well as an introductory title.

However, after the game rolls credits, a new mode is unlocked. In the Safari Park, you'll be completing images of multiple Pokémon in a variety of settings. These puzzles skew towards the larger side, have stricter Great Ball times, and most crucially, multi-screen puzzles which are split into 4 quadrants no longer tell you if one quadrant has been successfully completed. You must verify for yourself that no required square has been left unfilled, which ultimately soured me on my experience quite a bit. When you're trying to make that Great Ball time, nothing is more frustrating than thinking you're done, only to have to go check your work across 4 different 15x15 puzzles, searching for the single pixel you missed. Later Picross games tend to change the color of the numbered prompts associated with a row or column once you have filled the proper number of squares, a QOL improvement which I desperately missed here. The game does allow you to mark the numbers yourself, but that takes enough time to do that I don't think I'd ever make a Great Ball time in the Safari Park while doing so.

In short, Pokémon Picross for the Game Boy is Baby's First Picross, until the Safari Park happens. I think it's a great introduction to this style of puzzle, and a much more worthwhile entry than other titles on the Game Boy. But there is a serious handbrake turn towards frustrating difficulty in the post-game, and I haven't even taken into account any time penalties for marking the wrong squares. As an unearthed relic that never saw a formal release, I think it's absolutely worth checking out, just don't expect anything groundbreaking.