There’s a good reason that we here at Michibiku are fans of the Gotta Protectors series enough to keep up with its often-hard-to-follow information flow. It’s not that the games are ever particularly impressive in size or mechanical depth. It’s not that they tell interesting stories, or that they’re just so polished that they can’t be ignored.

It’s this: they’re always a heck of a lot of fun to play with friends in a way few games can match.

By this point in a franchise like Boxboy!, fatigue starts to set in. No matter how charming the premise or engaging the puzzles, anything so simple and straightforward is bound to wear out its welcome at least a bit and deliver diminishing returns to the player.

Boxboy! + Boxgirl! doesn’t have that problem.

When Picross S3 released sporting color puzzles for the first time, it wasn’t exactly a new thing in the world of nonograms. Multi-shade picture puzzles have been around for decades, and they’ve even made their way into HAL’s 3D spinoff series.

But it’s a big deal for them to finally show up in the genre’s flagship games, and there are a few reasons why.