Picross (Nintendo DS)

I love logic puzzles, I really do. Sudoku comes close, but at the higher difficulty levels you start having to guess (or at least experiment a bit) as each space could hold two possible answers. That doesn't make it any less fun, but I do sometimes grumble. I have fallen in love with Picross for this very reason - every single move from beginning to end can be logically determined. It's not always obvious, and you've got to be good at running number patterns through your head, but at the end of the day logical elimination and selection works on each and every move.

The premise is fairly simple: you are presented with a grid of squares ranging from 5x5 and up and your job is to mark squares that end up drawing a picture of some sort. Obviously smaller grids rarely resemble the object they're supposed to represent, but at the end of the day the picture isn't what you're supposed to be thinking about anyway. The top and left sides of the grid are lined with various series of numbers and each series represents all of the information you need to mark the right squares. The numbers tell you how many marked squares are in its respective row and how many are connected in a sequence.

This would probably best be served by an example. Let us say that in a 10x10 grid one row has the number series "1 6 1." This would be a row you could fill immediately because you are told that it will be one square, a space, six squares, another space, and a final square. It gets tricky when you only have something like "2" for a row of ten possible squares. You must look at all rows simultaneously and find the initial thread, the initial squares you can either mark or eliminate that will start unravel the puzzle as a whole. I love it. Larger puzzles can take a very long time, and each mistake you make in normal mode will add to the timer that tells you how long you took. It's worth noting that the only measure of "points" is in fact the timer itself. A lower time is better, although it only serves as a point of pride - it won't disqualify you for making large numbers of mistakes.

There's one other mode worth specifically mentioning - Free Mode. Free Mode won't tell you when you make a mistake, you simply have to get the puzzle 100% right on your own for it to finish. Those are much more challenging, and it's not so much the timer as it is just finishing the damn thing in the first place that serves as bragging rights. I'm moving much more slowly in this section...dammit, they're hard. I like that though. I haven't been able to put Picross down for more than a few minutes while I'm home, and considering my distractability that's a big thumbs up on its own. I will state emphatically however: if you don't like numbers, don't even pick it up - you'll hate it.