Finally, we're away from that megalomaniacal crackpot putting everyone around him through psychological and physical torment for his own twisted amusement. But enough about Dave Lang on the Premium BLLSL feed (I finally watched the rest of it), it's time for some more fashionably late Mento's May Mastery. For a daily feature I've put together for the fourth year in a row now, I'm certainly not being very diligent with it.

By a happy coincidence, the last game I played hit the three day limit at the same time that I was able to beat it. I can now pass onto the next game in my randomized list of high-priority backlog items, and you can rest assured that this a two-day game at most. Still interesting though.

Life of Pixel

I feel like the "self-reflective and partly satirical journey through the history of video games" framing device may well become its own category on Steam soon enough. Indies love being meta, after all, and with so many games that already hearken back to earlier eras of game design, it's only natural we'd get a few fourth-wall breaking takes on exploring multiple technological milestones. I suppose the most notable exemplar of this framing device would be Evoland, a game that ran the gamut (game-ut?) from rudimentary 8-bit black-and-white RPGs to the PS1 era of Final Fantasy VII JRPGs and its kin. Vinny and Alex recently looked at another one: A Pixel Story (which I actually mistook for Life of Pixel at one point).

However, while the references from those two games didn't exactly fly over my head, I didn't get quite the nostalgia boost from those that I did from Life of Pixel. Possibly because it appears to have been designed from someone from my homeland, or at least one of our European neighbors (I checked: the developers Super Icon are indeed British). Instead of just the usual Atari 2600, NES and so forth, Life of Pixel makes a few more obscure stops along the route to let the occasional remote parisher off the figurative bus. As well as the aforementioned mainstays as well as other transatlantic favorites like the C64 and Game Boy, Life of Pixel is also a Bluffer's Guide to a lot of early European computers. The sort that largely passed the US by, as they weathered through the 1983 Atari crash until the NES could save them.

We start with the Sinclair ZX81, moving through to the same company's ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro and the Amstrad CPC464. These were systems even I was too young to have much familiarity with; I very much began with the 16-bit Atari ST home computer and the Super Nintendo (though I was fortunate to have friends with other consoles, including the ZX Spectrum, C64 and NES). Still, there's certain elements of those systems that still resonate with me, and the developers were painstaking in recreating not only the look and feel of those games but also system-appropriate music and a few sly visual references to the better known games for that system. I'm still early on in the game - I've just reached the C64, the sixth world of I don't know how many (but I suspect around thirteen if the stage number count is accurate) - but I'm enjoying what I've played so far.

Before I finish, I should probably say what kind of game it actually is, huh? Well, unsurprisingly, it's a 2D platformer. The type where you have to find all the collectibles before the exit will open and allow you to move on. It seems to be slowly introducing new mechanics, like the capacity to take multiple hits from enemies that I'm sure wasn't present from the offset, but for the most part you simply have a reliable double jump and a few stage-specific fixtures to use to your advantage. While the stage collectibles are essential to progress and reset every time the protagonist dies (which happens a lot - this is a game in the Super Meat Boy mold, if not quite as punishing), there's also a single world-specific collectible in each of the world's eight stages which nets you an achievement if you grab them all, as well as a game-wide scavenger hunt for Pac-Man style fruits and candy items that are way better hidden. Unfortunately, there isn't yet any way of knowing if one of these super-secret food items is in a stage or not, but I hope the game will start giving me hints once I've reached the end.

Needless to say, I'm curious where this game will go next. The C64, Game Boy, NES, SNES and Amiga are the only known quantities left for me to explore thus far (and I'm very interested to play those worlds, as they're all pretty formative platforms for me), but there's some mysterious spaces for many more yet to come.

I managed to 100% complete this game so I'll let you know now - there's no way to know whether a super-secret item is present, or if it was but you've already collected it. The developer has a bunch of videos on youtube that I resorted to for the last few. (I don't even remember if they're in 'chronological' order on the stats screen.) And if you're curious about the secret systems beyond the Amiga (spoilered in case you aren't): Apple II, Master System, Mega Drive.

I found the game pretty enjoyable, or else I obviously wouldn't have persevered, but it wasn't perfection - the bugs I experienced have probably been fixed by now, but it bothered me a little that movement never really changed over the generations. Levels got bigger and more complex, graphics and audio improved, enemies changed every now and then, but you always moved around the same. And the progression you're imagining isn't there either - spike pits and the like are always fatal, but the two-hit health bar is present from the start. Though I suppose, for a platformer, consistency is probably better than total obedience to history.