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I picked up Picross this weekend, and given the number of hours I’ve played it since then, I’m fairly concerned that I’ve got a serious addiction problem on my hands and I believe Picross should be sold behind the counter by prescription only. If you enjoy Sudoku, which I consider the gateway drug of puzzle games, you’ll love Picross.

The idea is pretty simple. Each puzzle is a simple grid where each square can be turned on or off that you decipher based on a simple rule set. At the end of the puzzle, if you look hard enough, it forms a picture. There is a time limit to each game of 60 minutes but if you guess wrong, you’ll get penalyzed minutes which can be annoying if, like me, you don’t have full control of your stylus and accidently hit a square you weren’t intending.

The rules are simply a set of numbers for each row and column representing runs of dots. For instance, the grid size starts out 10 x10 and one row might have 7,2 next to it which means there will be 7 squares in a row on and 2 squares in a row on. With that knowledge, you would draw the first seven squares on, the next off, and then the last two on (i.e. 10 total squares). Just like Sudoku, you’ll need to be cognizant of the vertical and horizontal axis of each square to fully determine which run of dots goes where.

The game takes 5 minutes to learn with a decent tutorial to start you off (albeit I couldn’t figure out how to skip it and at points, it becomes a bit pendantic) and then you are off and running. The puzzles get harder and harder over time, as you’d expect, with the clues more difficult to figure out and the grid sizes getting bigger.

If you have plenty of time to waste, I can’t recommend this game enough.