So, picross in 3D then. A game that should never have made it to the drawing board; but on the Nintendo DS, the puzzler’s console of choice, maybe – just maybe – it might work…

For the most part, it does. Beginning with a block of, well, blocks, the job of the player is to use logic to chip away at them until all the superfluous ones are removed and you end up with an adorable puppy, or something. Numbers on some of the blocks act as clues. A zero means that there are no coloured blocks in that row and all of them can be chipped away. A three means that there is a continuous line of three coloured blocks appearing somewhere in the row with the rest chipped away, and so on. Additionally, there are numbers in circles which mean that there is a single break in the sequence, for example an eight in a circle could mean that there are two blocks coloured, a block removed, then the remaining six coloured. Numbers in squares are similar, but mean that there are two or more gaps in the sequence. While it sounds confusing, it’s a very simple ruleset to pick up, and there’s no struggle at all in getting to grips with it.

The game controls near identically to Nintendo’s 2D picross game, but where that game’s controls were ill thought out, cumbersome, unnatural, and plain awful to use, Rittai Picross controls like a dream. Touching the puzzle with the stylus enables it to be rotated and moved in any direction, zoomed in and out, or allows layers to be removed to get into the guts of the puzzle. To smash a block, simply hold up on the D-Pad and touch it, to colour one in do the same holding right. Left-handed controls are also present. It feels entirely natural and almost perfect, the only imperfection comes from the player – it’s sometimes a bit too easy to press up and smash a block you meant to press right and colour, when rushing.

Complete a puzzle and it rotates for a few seconds before colouring itself in; a few seconds that offer opportunity to work out what’s been sculpted. A hot air balloon? A hot air balloon! Pegasus boots? Pegasus boots! A… a beaver? A forklift truck! When the colouring is done, the sculpture comes to life in a beautifully animated, looping sequence, the sheer graphical crispness of which is incredible for the DS. They are often funny, or emotive, with one in particular being utterly heartbreaking. The skill needed to animate these crude collections of cubes into something that feels real and recognisable must have been massive, but the results are nothing short of stunning.

Stunning though they are, and while they offer the game’s greatest compulsion to solve the next puzzle, they’re not enough to warrant overlooking the game’s flaws. Chief among them is the game's difficulty level, or rather its lack thereof. Traditional picross puzzles require countless techniques and strategies to solve and while it surely makes sense that an added dimension to puzzles should add numerous new ones, while retaining the old, in practice this isn’t the case. Aside from a few very basic techniques, puzzles are solved by simply stripping away layers and colouring/breaking the obvious blocks, spinning the puzzle 90 degrees and doing the same, then repeating the process until it’s finished. Any time the player is stuck it’s likely that there’s a very simple move just waiting to be found. On the plus side, this means that puzzles are always solved by the ‘skill’ of the player, as opposed to Picross DS’s (frankly disgusting) encouragement that the player should simply guess when they get stuck.

Much of the challenge of the game comes from the strict time limit you have to work to if you want to win the maximum three stars needed to unlock bonus puzzles. HAL have been plain cruel in implementing this: the final minute of a puzzle plays a tone every fifteen seconds to pile on an incredible amount of pressure to finish quickly, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything but the clock. The final minute is spent worrying about how much time is left, the player robbed of the cognitive capacity to continue solving the puzzle. Playing sans volume is, of course, a solution, but would mean losing the satisfying sound of a block being broken.

Technical issues also hamper things somewhat. While the game couldn’t work on any other console with any degree of efficiency, the excellent touch screen controls seeing to that, the DS’s inherent limitations cause their own separate problems – the screens aren’t quite up to it. While the puzzles are mostly clear, on larger puzzles (where the blocks visible are much smaller) it’s often very difficult to read a number without rotating the puzzle to get the best view, often not the ideal position for solving it. These graphical problems present even more of a problem in the circled and squared numbers, with it being far too easy to mistake one for the other unless the puzzle is rotated to the optimum position, but by the time you realise the mistake has been made.

Like Picross DS before it, Rittai Picross comes with an ever-increasing wealth of content. There are over 350 puzzles to solve in the main mode. Downloadable puzzles are at present released regularly and there’s room to store up to 300 on the cart (along with puzzles created in the ‘create a puzzle’ mode).

For the most part, Rittai Picross offers a simple, stress-free puzzle experience with the compelling reward of a wonderful animation every few minutes, and hundreds of puzzles to ensure that it’s a long time before it ends. Anyone looking for a challenge in their puzzles, however, won’t find it here.