It's strange that Nintendo and Jupiter don't allow more than one player to play in a Picross S series. We lost count of the number of times we played Picross on the Switch during major social events. There was only one person who could play at once, and everyone else had to wait and watch. The technology now allows up to four people to play simultaneously, which is a great thing. Picross S8 is now at least twice as fast as previous games.
This time, the basic plot follows blue and yellow cursor as they discover their parents, green cursor and yellow cursor, are out of prison now and are determined to get revenge on their children for putting them in their place. There are four characters in the story! All of the characters are your responsibility. There is not a single word of spoken or written dialogue, and there are no cutscenes. Although we joke, there are plenty of opportunities for heart-wrenching plot twists, and payoffs, that were years in the making, with four players.
This is Picross, however, the gameplay section. You won't find a better way to spend five minutes deciphering a complex, but logically sound set of numbers and creating a meticulously detailed pixel art reproduction of a urinal. You can almost always blame another person for making a mistake when you reach thirty minutes into a puzzle, realizing that all the progress you made over the past twenty minutes is a lie. This alone is worth the admission fee.
It can be cumbersome to play with four characters. A moving cursor will stop in its tracks if it encounters another one. But there is something very appealing about the chaos. Although you may all be working towards a common goal technically, each player's squares are added up and tallied in real time. Importantly, if someone erases your square and you fill it in again, your score will go down and yours will rise. A few puzzles quickly turned into defending and seizing real estate. It's like a very primitive version of Splatoon.
Picross S8 is the perfect game for anyone looking to add a few hundred puzzles to their already impressive collection. Picross S8 can be a great starting point, but it's best to watch at least the first two seasons of the anime in order to understand the concept. This game is so powerful that it outperformed the seven previous games (or ten if you include the spin-offs). It also received updates that included universal touch support and four-player multiplayer. So go buy it. Now.
PicrossFour multiplayer is more chaoticOpen-world exploration feels strange, but welcomeUnIvEsAl toUcH sUpPoRtWe are still 95 players short Picross 99Why is there so many? Great810 Jupiter provides Scoring Policy Review Copy
