Nintendo has a new rewards program to replace their Club Nintendo one, and it’s called My Nintendo. You mostly get rewarded for doing online tasks this time, and the rewards are all download and online things only.  One of the exclusive rewards you can get is a new game for the 3DS: My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  It’s a Picross puzzle game featuring music, backgrounds, and characters from Twilight Princess, and is laid out a lot like Pokémon Picross, except without all the free-to-play stuff.  Since I had enough points to redeem it, I decided I’d review it here as well!

In Picross, you have a grid playfield and must use number clues on the top and left sides to figure out which squares to fill in and which to leave empty. I’m not very good at explaining the rules further than that, but luckily the game does a much better job than I could.  At the beginning, you’ll do an interactive tutorial where Midna explains the rules to you with five practice puzzles, and then you’re on your own.  But like I said, the game does a great job of teaching you the basics, at least.

Most of the pictures you’ll uncover in the game have to do with Zelda titles. You’ll make pictures like bombs, pots, Iron Boots, lanterns, Malo and other characters, plus much more.  There are three main modes of play.  In regular Picross, you’ll solve 45 puzzles that range from 10×10, 10×15, and 15×20 sizes.  In Mega Picross, you’ll solve 45 more puzzles and some number clues take up two lines here.  But they didn’t explain this new rule very well so it was hard for me to wrap my head around it.  In those two modes, you can choose to get a hint at the beginning of the puzzle that tells you a row and column of squares to fill in, but you’re not penalized for using it.  The last mode is Micross, and you get a huge picture with smaller Picross puzzles to solve to make one big mural.  You don’t get a hint option in this mode, though.

The game will save your progress, even if you’re in the middle of a puzzle, which is nice. The only problems I had with the game were that any puzzle larger than 10×10 was too hard to see, and there wasn’t a ‘zoom’ option that I could find.  The pictures you reveal will be in color if you solve them under a given time, and you get a time penalty if you miss a square.  But that can be pretty easy to do since the squares are so small on the touch screen.  And while the game is technically free, it still costs 1,000 My Nintendo points, which seems like a lot for what you get. Even so, it’s one of the more worthwhile My Nintendo rewards right now, so if you have an account, you may want to download this if you like Picross and Zelda games.  Maybe in the future, they’ll make more Picross games with Nintendo characters.  I’d like a Kirby Picross, how about you?

Kid Factor:

Reading ability and good math and logic skills are a must for this title, but because the game reinforces those skills, it could be considered educational, too. My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews