PicoPix Winter Edition

There aren't many things in the comic Viz that don't make us laugh, but one gag in particular had us spluttering our morning coffee a few months ago. It was a sudoku board that seemed ordinary enough at a glance, but transpired on closer inspection to have numbers repeated in lines. It didn't work. That's comedy.

The fact that we couldn't find anybody else who found it funny was mystifying.

Puzzle games are such delicate constructions. Swap two boxes in a game like sudoku while the player is looking the other way and the whole thing snags up, tightening like a rabbit snare around the nib of the pen. You only have to get one thing wrong to ruin it all.

Puzzle nerds and highly intelligent game journalists (for they are different things) may have first come across PicoPix before in the form of a pen and paper tsunami puzzle. This compulsive puzzle game format has been brought to mainstream attention on the DS with the popular Picross, but for those who don't own one of Nintendo's many folding babies: PicoPix is tsunami. For those who do: it's Picross.

The object of the game is to create a picture by marking squares on a grid. Across the top and down the left-hand side of the grid are sequences of numbers indicating how many of the squares to be filled in are connected with each other. If there's a number '5', somewhere along the adjacent row or column, five squares in a row will need to filled-in. If there's a '5' and then a '3', this means that there's a line of five and another of three, in that order, unconnected.

By cross-referencing the numbers, it's possible to deduce the location of each of the squares, just as you deduce the location of the numbers in sudoku, and PicoPix is just as stultifying and hypnotic.

We've already reviewed PicoPix favourably, and PicoPix Winter Edition is, as you'd expect, more of the same but with a Christmas theme. It works in exactly the same way, with a series of levels that you unlock by completing all of the puzzles in the preceding level. As you advance, the grids grow larger and the gameplay consequently becomes more difficult.

The interface is PicoPix's strongest feature. You move around the squares with the thumbstick or the corresponding numbers on the keypad, and flip them over by pressing the '5' key. The graphics are clean, colourful, and well-animated, and each flip is accompanied by a quaint chime. Once you complete a picture, it automatically colours to produce an oddly captivating Legobrick illustration.

Unlike with tsunami, it's impossible in PicoPix to flip the wrong square and become entangled in bogus permutations. Whenever you try, the square springs back and you lose increasingly large chunks of points.

Just as one false move by the player can unravel the whole game, however, a false move by puzzle designer can render the puzzles pointless. And while PicoPix makes a good job of the secondary features, it stumbles over a couple of the basics.

At the more trivial end of the spectrum, some of the early puzzles require you to trudge around the grid filling in every square of the outer edges. Not the end of the world, no, but pointless all the same. Why not simply make the grid smaller? Or the image it conceals larger?

More serious, though, is the fact that in places it's simply not possible to work out which squares should be filled-in from the numbers available, forcing you to resort to educated guesswork, probing likely squares at the cost of a few points a pop.

We're prepared to hold our hands up if a better PicoPix player can prove us wrong. It may well be the case that every picture is deducible after all. But then, if minds like ours (huge ones) are struggling with the training levels, difficulty is an issue.

Still, just because PicoPix's dynamic will rub puzzle purists up the wrong way, it's by no means a bad game. Certainly, if you're tired of being served up the same old block-matching gruel, you could do a lot worse than this.