Picross 3D

2025-12-06
It is a Saturday and I am in Maine on a ski trip. The house is littered with High Noons because me and my 10+ friends in the house are in our 30s and beers and liquor hurt our senile stomachs. I need to be in the car on the way to the mountain to snowboard but I am compelled to write a game review, as I try to write 3 a week. Similarly every morning for the past two months I have felt compelled to finish a puzzle or two in Picross 3D.

Guided by a mutant cubist duck creature and some of the worst music you’ve ever heard, your job is to excavate increasingly mundane objects from their cube prisons. It is incredible, with the core act of chipping blocks being delightfully tactile on the DS' resistive touch screen. Or at least with my ADHD riddled brain it is. You start with simple puzzles, pecking out the simplest of nonograms, but eventually you're hollowing out cavernous spaces by juggling numerical sums across rows and columns as you criss-cross slicing them across each dimension like some sort of higher order lifeform that can x-ray anything and everything across all axes.

It only has two problems. One: it takes far too long for the difficulty to ramp up. There are 300-some-odd of puzzles in the game and I must have finished 150 before I got one that actually made me miss the 3 Star rating. This is honestly pretty minor given even the easy puzzles hold the same methodical zen joy as any other nonogram.

The second problem--the real bugbear that only reared its head in the very last two levels of the game--there is absolutely no room for error if you're trying to perfect each puzzle. Imagine you are 20 minutes into a puzzle. You are locked in. You are delicately, precisely knocking out each block, focused on not making a single mistake. With 5 minutes left to finish the puzzle you are in the home stretch, on track to finish with a 3 star rating, and you, like Dennis Reynolds, are a fivethree star man. Nothing less than perfection is acceptable. You identify another unecessary block and send the stylus in for the kill, shattering the cube into nonexistence. And then your hand twitches. One of those normal involuntary twitches we all have every once in a while. But this one sends the stylus right back in for a double tap and in its path now is not a cube that needs to go but a cube that needs to stay. Your brain registers the "BWOoong" sound of a mistake from the DS' speakers before you realize what your hand did. After 20 minutes you have to restart the entire puzzle if you want a perfect rating.

Yes this actually happened to me. Go fuck yourself, puzzle Hard 10-G. Now if you want to just breeze through the game you can go for 1 star ratings. In this case you can make up to 4 mistakes and get extra time to boot. But you won't open up bonus puzzles. Which, honestly, who gives a fuck? It's not like you unlock something cool like a pixellated dick or boobs. You just get more puzzles of like tractors and whales and shit. Did I mention there are 300 puzzles? But of course I'm a piece of shit and had to get those bonus puzzles so the game's absolute inability to suffer even one mistake--especially in those long and difficult end-game puzzles--feels entirely too brutal. So I clicked wrong once, now I have to redo the entire puzzle, which I've already seen the solution to at this point, just to unlock yet another puzzle? It's a head-scratcher of a design choice in a game that otherwise feels very carefree and fun.

And yet despite all that if you've caught the nonogram bug like I have what's on offer here is fan-fucking-tastic. It's probably one of the best puzzle games I've ever played, and one of the easiest to get into to boot.