GAME CLEAR Special -- Pictonico!

GAME CLEAR No. 307 – Pictonico! Vol. 1 (2026, Android/iOS)

Developer: Nintendo EPD, Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Version: Android
Clear Platform: Pixel 9 Pro (Android 17)
Clear Date: 7/27/26

Look at this photograph

It’s kind of remarkable that it took this long for a WarioWare game to appear on mobile phones. If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise, it is a series of compilations of dozens of “microgames.” These microgames have simple inputs and take place over the course of a few seconds. A prompt appears, and then you are expected to quickly intuit what you must do to win. They are typically silly and often have surreal subject matter and styling. The combination of simple controls combined with bite-sized, short-session gameplay made it a great fit when the series debuted on Nintendo’s own Game Boy Advance, and the same naturally applies to mobile devices.

Perhaps you are wondering what Pictonico! has to do with WarioWare. Well, Pictonico! is WarioWare with the Wario elements scrubbed out. The extent to which Wario is a figure in the series is that he conceived of the games in-universe as a get-rich-quick scheme. With his buddies, he developed them. This is the light plot and setting that binds together a bunch of otherwise unrelated microgames, and it works! Wario did a personal rebrand from his bizarro Mario look to his biker outfit, and Nintendo made a whole supporting cast of similarly silly characters. I love them all. For reasons that I imagine are related to Nintendo’s reluctance to throw its core brands around willy-nilly, this game discards that established set dressing. Instead, they place a bet that slapping the cropped faces from the photos in your camera roll into amusing microgame vignettes will be enough to elicit smiles. The strategy mostly works (and indeed perhaps is more appealing to folks outside of Nintendo’s existing customer base).

Although it bills itself as “free to start”, the free bit of Pictonico! is just a three-microgame demo. What have been released so far are 80 microgames split across two volumes of $7.99 and $5.99 USD each. This bit seems particularly vexing to some people, which I think probably is mostly related to differing expectations among mobile gamers. I would personally much rather permanently purchase a game (or chunk of one, as the case may be) for a few bucks than have it rationed to me in forced time intervals that can be skipped by buying enough gems or sparks or florps or whatever.

I digress. Volume 1 contains 50 games, and Volume 2 contains 30 (explaining their price difference, I suppose). The individual games of each are unlocked by playing through their constituent Stages. Each Stage consists of a mix of 10 games from the Volume that must be completed sequentially with no more than three failures (a crown is awarded for no misses). As the Stages progress, new games are introduced mixed with higher-difficulty versions of ones you’ve already seen. This continues until you’ve seen them all, after which the final few stages are ever more challenging until you’ve played the highest difficulty of each game at its max speed. As you complete the Stages, you’ll also unlock play-until-failure endurance modes featuring every game from the Volume that you’ve seen so far.

With that rather dry description of the structure of the game’s content out of the way, perhaps I should tell you about the games. They’re the heart of the thing and what make it fun. Like those found in cousin WarioWare, the microgames found here demand that a simple action be performed among the relative few afforded by modern mobile devices: tapping, scrubbing, or touching and dragging (no gyro games sadly). The gimmick, again, is that you and your friends are the stars. When you drag a rolled-up red carpet out to a limo, a tuxedoed figure with your face may step out. Perhaps you’ll have to pluck unsightly nose hairs from your mother’s schnoz. Maybe you’ll have to use the eyebrows of the man on an advertisement in the background of a vacation photo as pinball flippers. It’s not just faces, though. One microgame, for example, has you complete a little jigsaw puzzle, and that picture may just be a scenic landscape shot of Monaco you recently snapped if you were there recently or something. Anything in the folder you give the game access to is fair game. But don’t worry — if you wish to prevent your toxic ex or painful memories of a departed loved one from jumpscaring you, you can curate your folder as you choose or simply have the game prefer recent photos.

The critical bit here is that you must be a bit of a shutterbug to get much variety. I’ve become better over the years about taking selfies occasionally and especially group selfies when out with friends. I feel I’ll treasure them as I age. That gives me a pretty solid range of photos to choose from. I do wish it were a bit better at identifying faces that belong to the same person (since I see myself an awful lot), but I imagine that would only exacerbate concerns folks might have about privacy (although Nintendo insists photos used in the game never hit their servers, and that’s probably true). Despite this limitation, I find the game serves me a nice variety of pics new and old, and I am generally delighted by the memories they elicit or amused by the occasional background rando that pops up. Of course, if you’re less inclined to pull out your camera, you may get less mileage out of that.

Anyway, I’ve rambled a bit again. Back to the gameplay. The fun of it is in quickly identifying what you actually need to do and executing it. In the intro stages, I found it nearly trivial to get perfect scores, but the challenge does ramp up, and it’s especially tough in the endless modes, in which I may never earn all the medals. The fun is isn’t in the individual games (although they can often be amusing and clever) but in the gestalt of clearing a series of mildly challenging tasks without failure. That may not sound super engaging on paper, but it really is more fun than it sounds. I think I’d have said the same about the very first WarioWare way back in 2003, a game I still hold in very high regard. What was great on GBA is perhaps even better suited to a device you have on you at all times.

If you’ve given that (or a game of its ilk) a try and it doesn’t work for you, I doubt you’d feel differently about Pictonico!. If you do dig that sort of game, I hope you’ve already downloaded Pictonico! to at least give its free sample a try. If you’ve never known the bliss of the microgame flow state, I think this is just as good a place to start as any, at least if you can bear the thought of parting with seven of your hard-earned dollars. As I think I’ve probably said about all of the small number of mobile games I’ve written about on here, it’s a much better use of your phone time than scrolling.

GAME CLEAR No. 308 – Pictonico! Vol. 2 (2026, Android/iOS)

Developer: Nintendo EPD, Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Version: Android
Clear Platform: Pixel 9 Pro (Android 17)
Clear Date: 7/28/26

Snap, tap, do it again

Oops. In GAME CLEAR No. 307 I think I made that mistake I often make where I write in a verbose way that assumes my reader has never heard of video games in their life. Call it, uh, cultural sensitivity or something. Anyway, Volume 2 is a slightly smaller (and slightly cheaper) set of microgames for you to enjoy in this photo-infused microgame compilation. They’re comparably whimsical and I think basically any in this second set would be interchangeable with the first. A nice thing is that if you own both, you can play a megamix of all of the games in the endless modes.

I reckon if this game does well enough, Nintendo may make further game packs. It’s also possible they already have more planned as part of a longer-term support plan regardless of initial success. I’ll probably get them if so. I love this sort of shit. I’ll especially do it if they add gyro-based games (I’m not kidding).