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The name of this game may lead you to bury your head in the sand, believing it to be another Tetris clone. We nearly did - but thank goodness for common sense, which dictated we should play it before casting judgement.
Pictris is, in actual fact, a logical puzzler. It doesn't involve falling tiles or tessellation -instead, you are presented with a grid of squares within which is hidden a pattern. Think of it as a cross between Minesweeper, Battleships andd those Logic Puzzles you use to get in magazines - the ones consisting of grids of squares that you had to tick off with the aid of textual clues to reveal the solution to the puzzle.
In Pictris, clues to the pattern are given in the form of numbers next to each row and column of the grid, telling you how many groups of blocks are hidden in the tiles. A "5" next to a row, for example, indicates that in that row, there are five blocks next to each other. If, as in the game's tutorial, there are only five squares in the row, you can click all of them.
Revealing a pattern becomes much trickier on the larger grids you will find in the main game, which requires you to complete a large number of grids in sequence to finish the game. As with many popular puzzle games, the premise is engaging but simple, making the game quite addictive. The challenge comes in the form of a time limit.
You're given 30 minutes to complete each grid, which may sound far too generous - your first mistake will only cost you a single minute - but subsequent mistakes double your time penalty to 2, 4, 8 and 16 minutes. Hence, make five mistakes in quick succession and you're finished.
Without this killer time penalty, tactics would go out of the window and you'd be free to unleash your mouse in a bout of frenzied clicking all over the grid to complete a level in record time. With it, however, Pictris becomes a highly addictive thinking man's game, which should be easy, but often calls for much head-scratching. If there was a portable Amiga to play it on, it would make an ideal train journey time-killer... it already makes a good "I really should be doing some work" time-killer...
Originally reviewed in issue 13
by David Stroud.
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