Konami is getting its own Picross game featuring classic pixel art

The next game in the Picross series will be themed around Konami games.

Picross developer Jupiter has announced Picross S: Konami Antiques Collection, which will be released on the Nintendo Switch eShop on April 30.

As with other games in the Picross series, players are presented with a series of puzzles where they have to determine which squares to colour on a grid based on numerical clues.

By filling in all the squares correctly, the puzzle will be completed and an image will be revealed – in this case, the image will be a sprite from a classic Konami game.

The game’s 585 puzzles will cover more than 80 games from Konami’s 8-bit and 16-bit history, from popular games like Castlevania, Gradius, Metal Gear and Contra to more obscure titles like Esper Dream, Jikkyou Power Pro Wrestling 96 and Wai Wai World 2.

In total there will be 150 Picross puzzles, 150 Mega Picross Puzzles, 5 large Clip Picross images (consisting of a total of 200 puzzles), 30 Color Picross puzzles, 5 Extra puzzles and a Time Attack mode with 30 puzzles.

Although the game will be released on Nintendo Switch, it also supports mouse controls for players on Switch 2. Button and touchscreen controls will also be supported.

Jupiter has ten games in its main Picross S series on Switch, as well as a series of licensed spin-offs, of which Picross S: Konami Antiques Collection is the ninth.

Previous Picross S spin-offs, all of which are still available on the Switch eShop, include versions based on Sega Master System and Mega Drive / Genesis, Capcom, SNK, Namco, Doraemon, Kemono Friends, The Rising of the Shield Hero and the Overlord anime.

Jupiter also released some licensed Picross spin-offs on the 3DS, including Pokémon Picross, Sanrio Characters Picross and My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It also released Pictlogica: Final Fantasy on mobile.

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.”