System: Nintendo DS

Publisher: Nintendo

Reviewer’s rating: **1/2

ESRB rating: Everyone

Game type: Puzzle

Kind of like: “Picross”

Best feature: Hundreds of puzzles.

Worst feature: It takes awhile to unlock the truly challenging crosswords.

The bottom line: Crossword puzzles are such a natural fit for the stylus-equipped DS that you can’t help wondering what took them so long.

“Crosswords DS” features countless brain-teasers — along with crosswords, it throws in a bunch of word search and anagram solving games, too — that will appeal to the ever-growing mob of casual gamers who made titles like “Brain Age” and “Picross DS” such big sellers.

It uses the same elegant, intuitive control system as the Sudoku puzzles in “Brain Age”: You use the stylus to select a square, then zoom in and fill in the letter. The game’s character recognition is only occasionally annoying — for instance, it sometimes struggles to tell the difference between “A” and “H,” or “L” and “I” — but those rare cases can usually be fixed easily by using lowercase letters.

Early crosswords are absurdly simple, consisting of mostly three- and four-letter words with obvious (and often redundant) hints. Unfortunately you have to solve a pretty huge number of these before you unlock larger grids with longer words and trickier clues.

At that point, the ability to save your progress if you can’t finish an entire puzzle in one sitting becomes a major plus.

There’s no multiplayer component, and no other frills at all, really. But wordplay buffs will love working these puzzles without getting all that pesky newspaper ink on their hands. Just don’t tell my boss I said so.