PICROSS S8 Review (Switch Online Store)
In a multiplayer focused series like Picross C, it always seemed odd that Nintendo and Jupiter didn’t allow more than two players to play at the same time. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve played Picross on our switchboard during a major social event and only one person could participate while everyone else in the room just had to stare longingly and wait their turn. Fortunately for us, technology has finally been developed that allows four players to play at the same time. This means the Picross S8 is at least twice just as good as the last few games.
The main premise this time around follows the Blue and Red Cursors discovering that their parents, the Green and Yellow Cursors, have escaped from prison and are determined to avenge being framed by their children. Look, there are even four characters! You must fill in all the gaps yourself – there is not a single line of written or spoken dialogue. anywhere and there are no commercials after all. We’re kidding, of course, but with four players, there’s plenty of room for heartbreaking plot twists and payoffs that you’ve been working on for years with friends and family.
Otherwise, in terms of gameplay, this is definitely Picross. Where else can you spend five minutes parsing a convoluted but perfectly logical set of numbers to painstakingly recreate a urinal in pixel art? But now that there can be up to four simultaneous players, you can almost certainly blame somebody else for the mistake you made when you spent thirty minutes solving a puzzle and realized that all of your collective progress over the past twenty minutes was a lie. This alone is worth the price of the entrance ticket.
A four-character game can be tedious – a moving cursor always stops in its path if it encounters another – but there’s something quite enticing about this chaos. Even if you’re all technically working towards a common goal, there’s certainly little collaboration here as each player’s completed squares are tallied up and added to their real-time score total. Most importantly, if you erase someone else’s square and fill it again, his score will decrease, and yours will increase. Thus, we were faced with several puzzles that quickly turned into the capture and protection of real estate, to hell with a real puzzle solution. It’s like a very primitive version platoon.
If you’re looking for a few hundred more puzzles to complete your collection of what should one thousand by now Picross S8 is the game for you. If you want a good starting point, the Picross S8 is a decent place, but we recommend that you at least watch the anime’s first two seasons to get a decent feel for the premise. Either way, this game radiates so much power that it did the previous seven games (or ten if you count the spin-offs) better through updates that added universal touchscreen support and four-player multiplayer. So go buy. Currently.
