The next game in the Picross series on Switch is a Doraemon crossover
Picross S Doraemon & F Characters Edition is out later this month
The latest game in the Picross series is coming to Switch later this month, and it’s a crossover edition.
Picross S Doraemon & F Characters Edition is based on the work of Hiroshi Fujimoto, better known as his pen name Fujiko F Fujio.
As the name suggests, the most notable of Fujimoto’s characters is Doraemon, the robotic cat who’s been appearing in manga, anime and video games since 1969.
The game, which will be released on March 26, will cost $10.99 / £9.89 and features a total of 200 puzzles, spanning the Picross, Mega Picross, Color Picross and Clip Picross modes regularly seen in the Picross S series.
A free demo is available for the game now on the Nintendo Switch eShop, allowing players to try it out if they’ve never played a Picross game before.
Also known as nonograms, Picross puzzles present players with a grid, around which are numerical clues. By using these clues players have to use logic to figure out which squares on the grid should be coloured in, and which should be left blank. If all the squares are correctly coloured, an image is revealed.
There have been 10 standard Picross S games released on the Switch eShop, as well as a number of spin-offs based on the likes of Sega Mega Drive and Master System games, Namco games, the Overlord anime and the Kemono Friends franchise.
Past Picross crossover titles on previous systems have included Pokémon Picross, Sanrio Characters Picross, Pictlogica Final Fantasy and My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, all of which were released on 3DS.
Earlier this week Nintendo added Game Boy title Mario’s Picross to its Switch Online library of retro games. Mario’s Picross was the first game in the series, one developer Jupiter continues to work on to this day.
Further reading
In a rare interview with VGC in 2023, Jupiter president Hirofumi Murakami and Norichika Meguro explained to us how its crossover Picross games are initially instigated.
“It’s almost always us who approaches the licence holder, going ‘hey, why don’t we do this’,” Meguro told us. “Initially we usually think about something straightforward, like a standard Picross game with the collaboration integrated. But with the Final Fantasy and Pokémon Picross games, they wanted to make sure each universe was expressed well within the Picross universe.”
“With the Final Fantasy one it was actually Square Enix who approached us and asked: ‘Why don’t you guys create a Final Fantasy-themed Picross on mobile? It could be interesting, would you maybe like to put a proposal together for us?’,” Murakami explained. “For Pokemon, we were just lucky because it was very good timing, but the bar was very high to make that happen.”
