Japan Gaming Guide

We’ve been playing around with Pokemon Picross for a few days and are rather enjoying it. It’s a free game with a few restrictions but we enjoyed it nonetheless.

For those unfamiliar with Picross, you are presented with a series of grids with numbers above and to the left indicating which squares are filled. For example ‘2,3’ would indicate two filled squares, with a gap of at least one square, then three filled squares. Sometimes these numbers give you enough information to fill in a row/column immediately, sometimes you’ll be able to mark a few squares, sometimes you’ll need to get some help by working out the contents of other rows/columns. It’s a really good core game and has quite a lot of depth to it, as well as being straightforward to pick up.

This being a Pokemon game, there’s a bit more to it than that. The twist here is that every level you’ll free a Pokemon who is added to your roster. You can take a team of Pokemon into each level, where they give you special abilities, such as filling in a couple of rows, highlighting mistakes, or giving you clues on what to fill in next.

Though the freemium nature of the game is a little annoying it doesn’t spoil things too much. You will need to take breaks every now and then as you can only make a limited number of moves within a certain time, although so far we’ve been able to do several levels consecutively without this kicking in. Similarly the Pokemon time outs can be a bit restrictive, but all the levels so far have been do-able without these abilities, and the difficulty spikes have been a welcome change from the gentle overall pace. Puzzle-heads may relish these challenges, but more casual players might not be so keen.

Overall we’d thoroughly recommend taking a look at this. It’s a lot of fun and the fremium stuff isn’t too annoying. There seems to be plenty to get your teeth into, and fans of puzzles and/or Pokemon will find a lot to enjoy.

Have a look at the trailer here:

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