Nintendo 3DS - PICROSS E2

Wait. If we’re following standard nomenclature, shouldn’t this be Picric 2e? As in, Picross5.43656... he, little math joke for yak there. I figure if you can’t make a joke about the number e in the context of Picric, a hardcore celebration of logic that results in pictures, then where can you? It’s a bit high-grade for Donkey Kong Junior Math, I grant yak that.
But if you’re wondering why there’s even more Picric on the back of Picric e - and I mean, these two releases were spaced just over a month apart – it’s because there’s always more Picric to be had. And this one actually brings an innovation to the table! Along with, know, more puzzles to attempt to satisfy your addiction. (As if a Picric addiction could ever be satisfied, though.)So, aside from five particular puzzles, the concept is much the same as it’s ever been:

Use the data provided along the top and left of this grid to determine which squares get filled and which remain blank, and then uses THAT data to inform even more determinations, ultimately culminating in a hairbrush or something. That much we know that much we’re familiar with. That much hasn’t really changed since Mario’s Picric, and certainly not sincePicross E1. But remember those five puzzles I mentioned earlier?

Well, they’re a bit bigger, kind of. E2 introduces a new set of challenges named ‘Micros,’ where a huge80x80 masterpiece is created by first solving an 8x8 puzzle for the rough outline, and then diving into each of those squares to provide more detail. So it’s not really an 80x80puzzle, which would have so much ambiguity it’d probably take a month and a half to finish – it’s really just up to 64 nested 10x10 puzzles, which come together and Bermuda Vinci, in Picric form.

And you thought you were just going to get a Pikachu or somethin’.Sure, some of these smaller puzzles might be brain-numbingly easy around the edges, but there’s some decent challenge to be had, with a more abstract form rather than something you could potentially guess at. So if we extrapolate out the math, that’s 64 sub-puzzles times five Micros puzzles, plus the usual Easy and Normal and Free modes that carry over from the first version, with about sixty puzzles each... aright, I’m tired of the math already.

Point is, you probably already know if you’re going to buy this, and that’s largely determined by whether or not you’re obsessed with obtaining all the Picric you can. (And that’s got to be fair chunk of the 3DS-owning population, else why would they be publishing these so frequently?)

Picric e offered almost no innovation, it just did Picric cleanly and pleasantly, and it worked. Now Picric e2 offers a bit of something new (even if said new part is steeped in twang harpsichord music), along with the same simple-and-clean interpretation of Nintendo’s pet puzzle format. Does this mean we’ll see yet another of these in another month and a half? My wallet wants - no, NEEDS - to know.


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