If you’ve been following this blog for a while, my obsession with Picross should be clear. Hudson did their own take on Jupiter’s Picross games with Illustlogic, an even more tortured portmanteau but a great take on the concept.

To be clear, there’s not much new or different about it. The puzzles make nice use of outlines and reversal of whitespace compared to later Picross instalments, and there are little control conveniences such as being able to wrap the cursor over the edges of the grid. I found the stylus controls unusable, but luckily the muscle memory I’d built from playing Mario’s Picross and Super Picross made the button controls serviceable—once I’d got used to X crossing out squares rather than B.

There’s a decent set of puzzles, in 10x10, 15x15, and 20x20. One category is all about Hudson game characters which is great, except I didn’t know any of them except Bomberman and Takahashi Meijin… There’s also a category that’s like mini-Micross, or Picross 2′s multi-puzzles, with 2x2 and 3x3 sub-puzzles. This rerelease of the game (denoted by the plus in the title) features the “Colourful Logic” mode, which I’ve seen before in iOS Picross knockoffs, so I guess this is where they knocked that off from. This mode has multiple colours available to fill in, which is a nice extra logic wrinkle that gives you a new trick to master, just as Mega Picross did.

With 215 normal, 100 Colourful, and 85 multi puzzles, it’s pretty good value. There’s also a star rating system that will reward you for passing certain time thresholds, and it’s fairly generous. I’m very glad I sought this out in Japan, and if you’re a fan of Picross it’s worth importing because it’s a very well-made knockoff, and the language is barely a barrier.

(Screenshot taken from Eurogamer)