Picross S+ has been announced, will bring the nine 3DS Picross e games to Switch

Picross developer Jupiter has announced Picross S+, a new Switch game that will contain the content from the 3DS Picross e titles.

There were nine games in the Picross e series, all of which were released on the 3DS eShop.

When the 3DS eShop closed down earlier this year, all of these games, as well as Jupiter’s other 3DS Picross spin-offs like Pokémon Picross and Sanrio Characters Picross, were delisted, and are therefore no longer available to buy.

Picross S+ is Jupiter’s solution to this, and will arrive on the Switch eShop in 2024.

As reported by Nintendo Life, Picross S+ will cost $4.99 / €4.99 / £3.99 and will feature all the puzzles from the first Picross e game on the 3DS.

Players will then be able to buy the content from the other eight Picross e games as DLC, with each costing a further $4.99 / €4.99 / £3.99, meaning the full collection will cost $44.91 / €44.91 / £35.91.

Of particular note is the fact that this will include the content from Picross e9, which was ultimately only released in Japan and never made it to the west.

In an exclusive interview with VGC earlier this year, Jupiter told us it was working on a way to preserve the puzzles from the 3DS eShop titles.

“We have a way to preserve the data, so we have a storage system that keeps the older titles, including the 3DS Picross e series, at our studio,” studio president Hirofumi Murakami told us.

“Because of that, we want to utilise these old games in some way in our future plans.”

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Curiously, though, in the same interview managing director Norichika Meguro also told us the studio had no plans to release a single Picross game and add DLC packs to it.

“We have internal discussions about allowing players to download puzzles as DLC,” Meguro explained, “but we figured that it’s better to put the game out as separate instalments instead of packing it as one single unit and allowing users to keep downloading new content inside that.

“Once you allow that user to keep downloading from a single unit, you have less of a chance to appeal to new users. So it’s better for us to keep publishing separate titles as a series.”

It may be that Meguro considers Picross S+ an exception, because it’s dealing with legacy content rather than new puzzles.