Parent's Guide: Picross 3D: Round 2 - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Picross 3D: Round 2?

Picross 3D: Round Two is a puzzle game that sees you chiselling away at groups of blocks to create a 3D model. Essentially a game of carving by numbers, you'll start off with a cuboid collection of blocks that's peppered with various numbers - and these numbers show how many squares need to be left on each line, and what colours you'll need to use to colour them in. Using a process of elimination, it's up to you to figure out where the squares need to go, and remove all the left overs to create your very own 3D model, whether it's a cat, dog, duck, or any one of 300 other designs!

How do you play Picross 3D: Round 2?

Picross 3D is a game that requires a hefty amount of logic - and as mentioned above, it really is a process of elimination. There are two different colours you'll need to use to colour blocks in - orange and blue - with the numbers on the end of each row providing all the clues you'll need to figure out the puzzle.

Some rows can have blocks of more than one colour in - but you'll need to figure out where the colours go. A number in a circle means the blocks of that colour on that row are split into two groups (so a three in a circle could be a one and a two, or a two and a one, with any amount of space in between), while a number in a square means those blocks are divided into a minimum of three groups. Needless to say, you'll need to use all the information you have to figure out where blocks can't go, which in turn will help you decide where they must go.

How easy is Picross 3D: Round 2 to pick up and play?

While it certainly requires a very particular way of thinking - and one heck of a lot of logic! - Picross 3D Round Two is a lot more forgiving than you might think. For one, there are three difficulty levels here - Easy, Medium and Hard. Easy peppers the cuboid with many more numbers, giving you nicer, simpler clues (there's much fewer square and circle numbers here), while Hard ramps the difficulty up to 11, providing only a handful of numbers, which will really test your mental nous.

Luckily, there's plenty of helping hands in game to give you a boost should you need it. For starters, you have access to an unlimited number of hints, and receive no penalty for using them, which makes figuring out what to do next a lot easier. Secondly, the vast majority of puzzles have no time limit - while previous Picross games have given you a time limit, and punished you for making a mistake by whacking a huge chunk of time onto your timer, Picross 3D Round Two instead simply gives you a score depending on how quickly you finished the shape, and how many mistakes you made.

With an excellent selection of tutorials to take you through the basics as thoroughly as you could ever want, Picross 3D Round Two may be a challenge, and may require a very specific type of logic, but it's also a game that pushes you in all the right ways, and actively wants to succeed. There's even a left handed mode, which mirrors the +Control Pad tool selection on the face button (A/B/X/Y) instead.

For the youngest of players, however, the logic required here may prove a little bit too challenging, while the game also requires a solid reading ability to understand its (non-voiced) tutorials. Sample sentences include:

• Welcome to Picross 3D: Round 2! It's a puzzle game in which you discover shapes that are hidden inside blocks like the one down on the lower screen.
• As you can see on the lower screen, the blue cubes keep their simple, cubic shape. The orange cubes, on the other hand, shrank down into all sorts of different shapes

With nothing in the way of sex, violence or bad language, there's nothing at all in the way of mature content in Picross 3D Round Two.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS