Picross S is the third most played game on my Switch at fifty hours. Before it I had never played a Picross/nonogram game before, and maybe that's for the best. Without hesitation, I will play any new Picross game released from this point on.
What keeps me coming back is the satisfaction of every solved square tightening the number of possible solutions further -- and that solving the final square requires the same deductive techniques as solving the first.
It's a game where you don't need to remember anything, because the marks that you make on the board remember for you. You don't need to plan ahead, because there's nothing to anticipate.
Once you get into them, these games offer you a known quantity of fun. And once you get good at them, a guaranteed period of Csíkszentmihályi-style flow.
You could say the same of all nonogram games. Now I'm playing Picross S2, which is Picross S with new puzzles, new music, and a new mode.
Having new puzzles is a thin excuse to play more: revealing the images hidden in the puzzle is not why I am playing. I've tried again and again to guess what the solved grid is supposed to represent as the final fanfare music plays, watching it turn into a picture titled something like 'dirigible' (which it does look a bit like if you squint…). This is probably because I've joined late on in the series and all the iconic grids have been used up. But I don't think I'd want to solve a puzzle based on what I think the picture should look like anyway.
How do they design the puzzles? Does it start with the images, or is there some way to design and finesse the hurdles and sprints? Is there someone in a cubicle somewhere drawing 10 by 10 square pictures of teapots, merlions, and potato bugs, playing through each of them as a puzzle and seeing which ones are fun? Because that's the stupid way I'd do it.
There's also the possibility that -- over the past 23 years that Jupiter Corporation has been making Picross games -- they've amassed a wealth of knowledge in how to design nonograms. Imagine an underground archive packed with pastel blue folders, all bursting with grids on yellowing paper, and handwritten notes on how this particular arrangement of squares makes for a particularly fiendish puzzle -- and when combined with this set of numbers makes for a relaxed second half!
This archive would be found in the world where you can find all of the objects depicted in the grids -- lakes, fireplaces, teapots, skiiers, fountains, hot-air balloons, stopwatches -- it's an airy world with modern cities littered with trees and parks, where everyone seems to always be on holiday, and where BGM 1 plays in all the hotel foyers.
The music is very important to how much I enjoy these games. It takes a honed, pointed talent to create a song that is only 30 seconds long and which you can listen to on repeat for a sum of fifty hours.
BGM 1 in Picross S2 is different from the BGM 1 of Picross S, and -- although the games are more or less identical in presentation and gameplay -- the new music excuses S2's existence as a separate entity.
Sam Gwilym, 29th of August, 2018