If you've got children to raise, a novel you've been meaning to write or a life you've been meaning to live, you may want to steer clear of Picross 3D.
Picross 3D is a new puzzle game for the Nintendo DS. Since Nintendo released the $20 game earlier this month, I've found that it has stepped up to fill many moments in my life.
When I was waiting for my wife to feed the cats so we could watch the next episode of Mad Men on Blu-ray, Picross 3D was there to distract me with its compelling and sometimes maddening puzzles. It was in my face when I was supposed to be writing my Skate 3 review. And Picross 3D has found its way into my hands nearly every time I was hoping to go to sleep.
I assume that many others like me – those with talkative children, presentations they should be preparing for and myriad other projects and people they'd rather ignore – will find Picross 3D an equally potent distraction.
The game is a deceptively simple cross between Minesweeper and Sudoku – you engage in deductive logic to carve objects out of solid blocks. Picross 3D delivers a metric buttload of these pleasant puzzles. I've spent hours immersed in the game, to the detriment of my personal life, and still haven't conquered all of the puzzles in the game's "normal" difficulty.
It's not just the puzzles that keep me playing. Nintendo has wrapped the gameplay in a nifty, but largely pointless set of rewards. One puzzle may reveal the shape of a heart. After you solve it, you'll see the heart in its resting place in a themed gallery – in this case, a quaint desktop garnished by a cup of coffee. Eventually, shapes discovered by other completed puzzles will join it there, eventually spelling "I (Heart) You." For every one of these galleries you fill, another five open up.
Even now, as I'm writing this stern warning about the potent distracting powers of Picross 3D, I felt drawn to play just one more puzzle, but was saved from diversion by the dead batteries on my Nintendo DSi XL.
Image courtesy Nintendo
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