I’ve been running short of Jupiter Picross games to play on 3DS (the absolute best place to play these type of logic puzzle games), so I’ve turned to third parties for a fix. Pic-a-Pix is a perfectly cromulent game with good controls, even if the pictures turn out a bit ugly.

This “Colour” instalment in Conceptis’s Pic-a-Pix series is all multicoloured puzzles, a variant of the classic nonagram which I was introduced to in Hudson’s Illustlogic + Colourful Logic on DS, and which Jupiter has only recently started implementing as an extra mode in their Picross games on the Switch. As with Mega Picross, it’s an extra wrinkle to keep your brain braining, but it adds some complexity with the controls as you swap between colours.

Apart from the constant colour toggling, this plays well. It works as I expect it to: hold up or down for mark or X, touch to apply. It’s all you need. There’s a “check mistakes” button present; good for accessibility but the puzzles weren’t so hard that I ever required it.

Presentation is very basic. This extends to the finished pictures that you create with your grid. They’re not juiced up at all as you solve them, so the garish colours you see is what you get, and the objects or scenes portrayed often look sloppily pixelled.

To be fair, the satisfaction of progressively solving the puzzle is far more important to my experience than getting a pleasing picture at the end, so I didn’t mind too much. I was just happy to play a new set of puzzles, competently put together on my favourite puzzling console. Now it’s time to move on to other Picross platforms, but if I ever want to come back there’s dozens of DLC packs for this game that I haven’t bought yet.