Deeply dislike the effect this game has on my brain. I’ll start playing it and look up and it will be an hour later and I’ll have no real concept of what I’ve even done within that hour other than check boxes, and I will just have lost all sense of time passing. The way in which this game just destroys any concept of time is kind of a horrifying sensation.

I used to play a ton of Picross years ago, and wonder if my relationship with it was maybe addiction-adjacent. I don’t find these games particularly fun, mentally engaging, challenging or nourishing, but my brain is drawn to them and struggles to put them down anyways. Had to force myself to stop playing this game, and I suspect I'll be avoiding other Picross games from now on now I'm more aware of the effect it has on me.

That said, even outside of how much it kind of breaks me, I don't even think this is a particularly good Picross game. It lacks a lot of quality of life features found in more modern iterations, some of the music is pretty irritating, and in the half of the game I completed it didn't provide a single puzzle that actually took advantage of the Mario IP.