It’s always good to have a well-made Picross game. What a pleasant surprise for Konami to put out a competent one that draws on their history!

My Picross options are drying up on 3DS (the best platform for it), so second best could potentially be iOS. The App Store is flooded with clones, although not all of them have the quality of life features you’d hope for, or are dragged down by leaning hard on the free-to-play cruft.

Konami’s Pixel Puzzle Collection is free and has no monetisation at all, so it’s a very unobtrusive experience. The main roadblock for my progression was the “boss puzzles”. These are a form of Micross where many smaller puzzles combine to form a big picture. But after completing a panel of these, a three-hour timer is introduced until the next one opens. In this way I played the game slowly over some months to finally clear all the puzzles, at which point you get to play them all again (plus some exclusive new ones!) in Expert Mode, without the ability to fill a square with an X.

My favourite feature of the game is the option to auto-fill a row or column with Xs if you’ve marked all the necessary squares. This helps in Expert Mode, but I did have to resort to taking a screenshot and annotating it with my own Xs on particularly tricky puzzles.

But I got ahead of myself. The game has a selection of 535 puzzles in all (including the Expert ones), which are assigned to you randomly from the title screen. You can have three going at once plus a boss puzzle. The subject matter is based on Konami’s “retro” pixel-based fanchises, with the headliners being Gradius, Parodius, Bomberman, Tokimeki Memorial, and Castlevania, but with a huge swathe of old arcade/MSX/etc. games being represented as well. I was delighted when I recognised a character, but it didn’t happen too often!

The majority of puzzles are 15x15, which is fiddly to deal with on a phone screen (squares are too small, or the puzzle has to be scrolled in zoom mode) but perfect on my iPad. I played mainly with a finger but occasionally with a capacitive touch stylus shaped like a dog. And after playing for so long, now it’s over and I miss it already…