Uh. What can I say? It’s more Picross. That is a good thing.

Picross e was good, and now I’ve figured out how to activate the auto-greying numbers I enjoy the gameplay a lot more. The macro painting mode was really cool, the individual puzzles are very different in style to normal ones and building up the picture is rewarding.

It still has the drawbacks compared to Picross DS, such as non-animated solutions (although the pixel art does look very nice), and lack of Nintendo-themed puzzles, which was a highlight for me. It also again ran out of content quickly, because I played it so ravenously. But that’s the style they’re going for, short and cheap, and frequently released. It’s like episodic gaming!

I also wish there were more harder puzzles, because the hardest ones began to really test me and forced me to strengthen my MIGHTY PICROSS SKILLS. I really love all of Jupiter’s Picross stuff. It won’t happen, but I wish they ported their old Mario Picross games to stylus controls, I would be all over that. It’s very hard to go back to moving a square around when you have such direct control on the DS.

I’ve also bought e3 and e4, and they to some extent replace Micross (the painting thing) with Mega Picross, which uses numbers over multiple rows, giving you a new technique to learn. I still enjoy Micross better though, so for the number of such puzzles in this game I’m tentatively awarding Picross e2 “best Picross e installment”.