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I've now completed most of the puzzles in this collection.

Most of the criticism is warranted! This pack of puzzles is indeed impossible to figure out with the usual techniques, most of the time. You'll have to guess once in a while.

However! You'll recognize many of the images, e.g. the Commodore 64 logo. In this way, it reminds me of Picross S Genesis and Master System for the Switch. Sometimes the symmetry of these images make for difficult puzzles.

The timer subtracts time for bad guesses, so you can't blindly guess.

Between these two elements, I found it just as enjoyable as a standard Picross game. I had to use all of my regular Picross skills to solve these puzzles, plus a bit more intuition than the normal. That doesn't make for bad Picross; it's just different.

The original Mario's Picross was created with difficulty curve in mind. Puzzles get harder as they go on, but are always do-able without guess work. This hack seems more focused on creating pixel art than actual puzzles. Plenty of times puzzles will be impossible to solve without guess work. I'm not just saying that either, puzzles will have no way of solving them by humans.

and I already have to guess. Picross is meant to be a game about logic - using the hints provided, you're supposed to be able to figure out all of the spaces that need to be filled in. However, 1B, 1E and 1F so far (that's as far as I've played) have all had multiple possible solutions. I'd advise you to check out Picross Touch on the Steam store - it's completely free, and has a verification system to confirm whether your puzzles would actually be possible to complete using the hints alone.

I cannot recommend this hack under any circumstances if this trend continues in the hints.

Edit: Since Maeson edited their review, I figure I should edit mine. Here's image evidence of something that should be absolutely unacceptable in a Picross puzzle.

https://imgur.com/a/lYvni78

Now, having reached this point in the game (this is puzzle 5-D in Easy Picross, by the way) one might say to themselves "you're an idiot; it's a diagonal line from top right to bottom left". However, Picross is a logic puzzle, as I have stated previously. There are six possible solutions to this puzzle. They are all equally, logically valid. The game will penalize you (two minutes for the first mistake, four for the second, six for the third, and eight for every subsequent mistake) for choosing the wrong one. This is ridiculous. In the original game, a situation like this would never occur, because the puzzles were ran through playtesting such that all these logical fallacies would be caught. This is why I recommended Picross Touch; it has an automatic verification system. You cannot submit this puzzle to the Steam Workshop; filled square limits notwithstanding, it is physically impossible to complete this puzzle without guessing this last 3x3 grid. Errors like this would be found before even coding the puzzle into the hack, and worked out as the author sees fit. In later games, starting I believe in Mario no Super Picross, "Free Mode" was added, both as an extra challenge and a reason to put more puzzles in the game. Free Mode does not penalize you for mistakes like this -

I've got 81 hours in Picross Touch alone. I've completed Picross S on the Switch, the original Mario's Picross, Picross E1, E2, E3, My Nintendo Picross TLOZ Twilight Princess, and the two japanese-only Picross titles on the 3DS. I've also completed Picross 3D 2, though that has a different set of rules due to you having to carve the solution out of a rectangular prism which is at most 10x10x10, and fill two separate colors in on the shape to differentiate between full cube pieces and non-cube pieces, like slopes or cylinders. Not that I need to prove myself, but I can tell when a Picross puzzle is garbage due to a logic error.

This is unacceptable game design. Get your puzzles playtested, or do it yourself with a verification algorithm.

I just tried 6 random puzzles, and only two did not require guessing to solve the puzzles. As other have said, these puzzles should not require guessing. Until the puzzles get tweaked, I wouldn't recommend this one.

I enjoy Picross and specially like the Mario Picross series although I'm not an expert, so I was quite happy to see a hack for the first game, and I tried it right away. I still have not played it entirely, so have that in mind.

But I feel the other review is unnecessarily harsh and rushed.

The first eight nonograms (or boards if you want) have a size of 5 by 5, and they are a bit problematic, mainly because they're too small for what the author of this hack wants to achieve, that is, recreate pixel art based on retro games, so sometimes the numbers can misguide you. Another little thing, is that when you beat these early picross, instead of letting you know what they are, they're just named "a sprite".

While that aspect could be ironed out a bit with some of those 8 first (tutorial-like) stages... Well, that's it. That's only 8 stages (and the easiest ones to boot, so it's not even "hard" to beat them) in a game with well over two hundred of them. You can't throw away an entire work for what amounts to a grain of salt in a mountain, specially when it could easily be improved by the author instead of being pointlessly destructive.

Anyway, things get instantly better after those eight nonograms, with 10 by 10 boards appearing after them. They're much more fun and I did not have problem clearing them.

As I said I'm still not done (not by a long shot) but what I've played has been quite fun, and I want to keep playing. The added entertainment of trying to guess from what game or what it is what you're trying to "draw" adds enjoyment for me.

I'll probably edit this review when I finish this hack (whenever that is), but for now I'm positive about it.

Edit:

I've been advancing more on this, and I really hate to say that it certainly goes into the "guessing game" others mention more often than it should. When it works it's really fun, and while often I would get the picture and be able to solve it, sometimes it was more because I recognized the image and more or less knew where I needed to point more than following the guidelines and calculating.

I still really like the concept for this and the retro-inspired sprites of the nonograms I find to be better here than in other retro-picross games like, I don't know, Pixel Puzzle of Konami, so I'd really like to see this improved, because I think it could be pretty great expansion for Mario Picross.

While I still believe that judging something three puzzles in is really not very smart, it's true that the flaws are there, and if ironed out. this could be an enjoyable game.

Don't get discouraged, Ross Adkin!

The original "Mario's Picross" was a challenging (but fair) game that gave the player a sporting chance to solve each puzzle with the hints and clues available. While this particular hack has some interesting puzzles (e.g. Link and Sonic), there are still too many times where you have to take a shot in the dark in order to figure out which spaces need to be filled in. As a result, it becomes too frustrating and unfair. This needs more work to where it can be a reasonably challenging (but fair) playthrough just like the original.

Huge fan of Picross and really glad to see a rom hack of the original mario picross. Done about 5 puzzles in kinoko so far and 3 of those 5 had multiple possible solutions or simply not enough clues to logically deduce the correct squares without guessing. I suggest taking another close look at some of the puzzles and making sure they're all solvable without having to take a swing in the dark on some (for example, princess in kinoko course). Otherwise, hope to see an update for this hack cause it's always really great to have more picross, especially with some cool nintendo sprites worked in.