I enjoy Picross and specially like the Mario Picross series although I’m not an expert, so I was quite happy to see a hack for the first game, and I tried it right away. I still have not played it entirely, so have that in mind.

But I feel the other review is unnecessarily harsh and rushed.

The first eight nonograms (or boards if you want) have a size of 5 by 5, and they are a bit problematic, mainly because they’re too small for what the author of this hack wants to achieve, that is, recreate pixel art based on retro games, so sometimes the numbers can misguide you. Another little thing, is that when you beat these early picross, instead of letting you know what they are, they’re just named “a sprite”.

While that aspect could be ironed out a bit with some of those 8 first (tutorial-like) stages… Well, that’s it. That’s only 8 stages (and the easiest ones to boot, so it’s not even “hard” to beat them) in a game with well over two hundred of them. You can’t throw away an entire work for what amounts to a grain of salt in a mountain, specially when it could easily be improved by the author instead of being pointlessly destructive.

Anyway, things get instantly better after those eight nonograms, with 10 by 10 boards appearing after them. They’re much more fun and I did not have problem clearing them.

As I said I’m still not done (not by a long shot) but what I’ve played has been quite fun, and I want to keep playing. The added entertainment of trying to guess from what game or what it is what you’re trying to “draw” adds enjoyment for me.

I’ll probably edit this review when I finish this hack (whenever that is), but for now I’m positive about it.

Edit:

I’ve been advancing more on this, and I really hate to say that it certainly goes into the “guessing game” others mention more often than it should. When it works it’s really fun, and while often I would get the picture and be able to solve it, sometimes it was more because I recognized the image and more or less knew where I needed to point more than following the guidelines and calculating.

I still really like the concept for this and the retro-inspired sprites of the nonograms I find to be better here than in other retro-picross games like, I don’t know, Pixel Puzzle of Konami, so I’d really like to see this improved, because I think it could be pretty great expansion for Mario Picross.

While I still believe that judging something three puzzles in is really not very smart, it’s true that the flaws are there, and if ironed out. this could be an enjoyable game.

Don’t get discouraged, Ross Adkin!