The Jeff Gerstmann Hall of Fame 018 (Patreon)

I love puzzles! Well, let me back up. I love smallish puzzles that I can come back to again and again. Puzzles with basic sets of rules that tax the brain without being too crazy. Sudoku's a solid one. Wordle was good, I used to play it at 2AM when my son was just a baby, up for a late-night feeding. But the one that grabbed me before all of those is Picross. Specifically it was Nintendo's Mario Picross that got to me first. I don't think I ever saw it on real hardware, it was one of those "well, we can emulate the Game Boy now, let's see what all is out there" kind of dives. I eventually had to pick up that cart. That game... well, we'll revisit that game another time, I'm sure.

This time, however, I want to talk about a game that evolves the basic Picross concept in a rad way. I'm talking about the 2010 release of Picross 3D. HAL Laboratories took the basic idea of the flat picross puzzle and adapted it to multiple layers of blocks. So instead of filling in a chart, it's more like chiseling away at a bunch of blocks until you get a weird little voxel-like sculpture at the end. I obsessed over this on its initial release and just started playing through it again, as it makes a perfect End of the Night Steam Deck kind of game. As such, it seemed like the appropriate time to commemorate it here in the Hall of Fame.

There was also a sequel, and it's pretty fantastic on its own merits, but maybe we can talk about that another time. Ultimately, though, I wish they made more of these. A small developer took a stab at it on the Switch back in 2020 or so, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't quite do it the way a guy like me needs it to be done. Maybe HAL will return in grand fashion on the Switch 2, right? I mean a 3D Picross game with a mouse in each hand does hold some appeal...