The Nintendo DS, that most ubiquitous of console hardware, has a problem. The truth is, there’s just too many games knocking about for the little thing. Visiting any games shop with a second hand section will give you a glimpse of how Ninty’s a victim of it’s own successas racks upon racks and floor upon floor is taken up by copies of stuff like ASH, Eyeshield 21, or, um, Girl’s Mode, lowering their cover price steadily in a bid to gain some, any, attention, like a lady of the night with the years catching up to her. It’s like 1983 all over again, and soon Nintendo will be drowning in a flooded market, or worse yet, entire continents will sink under the weight of unwanted shovelware. Right?

Well, no, not really. The DS, as I’m required to tell you before I’m banned from ever again posting on this, a DS specific site for burying the system after one article, is home to a great many great games. While it’s true shops are snowed under with carts, generally the Mario Kart cream rises to the top, while the unimaginative dross gets consigned to the bargain bin. This holiday season should see  a line up that’s just as packed with games working hard for your money as any of the big home consoles, with Scribblenauts, and the long awaited English translations of Mario and Luigi RPG 3 and Ace Attourney Investigations to name but three. Thing is, with the sheer volume of games on the market, it’s hard to look past the titles with major hype behind them and find something a little more obscure, but charming all the same. Hallo, it’s Rittai Picross. 

2006’s Picross DS was a fantastic game that found it incredibly hard to sell itself to non believers. Most of this trouble came down to the fact that it was, well, Picross, a pen and paper puzzle adapted electronically, involving colouring squares on a numbered grid in order to make a picture. Its major failing was that, much like DS Sudoku games, you could probably get a bunch of Picross puzzles off the internet for nowt, but Picross DS still was a DS binge game for me. It was rewarding as hell to spend an hour or two making a giant Mario picture, then using the editor to draw some boobs. I’m mature like that.

Rittai Picross is best described as Picross DS- But In 3D. Hopefully it’ll do better at retail than Picross DS on account of i) it’s 3D nature makes it more of a thing that could only happen on gaming hardware rather than a piece of paper and ii) it, too has a level editor allowing you to make a pair of boobs- But In 3D.

If you’ve never done a Picross puzzle before, it basically involves a grid, the size of which relating to the complexity of the puzzle, with numbers written beside the rows and columns. You have to colour in the squares on the grid, which correspond to the numbers to construct a picture. What Rittai does is strap several grids together in order to make a crude 3D model- and herein lies the first issue with Rittai Picross. Some 2D Picross puzzles can get ludicrously complex with giant 100×100 grids. 3D problems, then, could be many times as complex, but Rittai sees itself as a nice friendly game, and typically wants you to do a puzzle in ten minutes or so while you’re on the train. What that leads to is smallish puzzles, with fairly disappointing results. Picross DS would have the occasional monster picture of a Nintendo character which felt great to finish, but Rittai typically has you making dull household items, which given the resolution dictated by the game, often looks odd. ‘Well done!’ says the game, ‘You made a frying pan!’, to which you bleat ‘huh?’. Sometimes you’re asked to construct a big object by doing a bunch of smaller puzzles and having the results glued together, but it often feels unsatisfying.

The other major issue with Rittai is its interface. As its puzzles get harder, it can become difficult to see what’s going on. You can rotate around the puzzle fairly easy, but to look in the middle, you need to use a slicing tool to get a cross section. Maybe it’s my touch screen, but it seems every time I wanted to use the slicing tool, it didn’t work and vice versa. The result was often a square inadvertantly chipped away, the loss of a perfect rating, and a frustratedly snapped stylus.

Despite this though, Rittai managed to keep me nice and antisocial; and that’s largely due to its buckets of charm. The game recognizes that it’s asking you to construct crude, blocky 3D models, and reflects that in a charming early- mid 90’s aesthetic seen in its menus, SNES style music and ‘wacky’ 3D cube mascot. Bonus levels are unlocked through flawless and efficient play, ensuring replayability, though the fact that the game has well over 300 puzzles to get through means there’s plenty to do anyway.

Rittai Picross has more than its fair share of issues- perhaps it doesn’t quite deserve to sell better than Picross DS did after all- but give it a go, and I think you may be pleasantly surprised. And potentially rather addicted.

Rittai Picross Trailer