Life of Pixel

Initial impressions, revised:

This is another in a long line of feel-good, reverent throwbacks to my gaming childhood: a 2D platformer designed in the aesthetic of several 80s-90s-era, 8 and 16-bit video game consoles, including personal computers of the era.

You play a green pixel, appropriately named Pixel, who's fed up with being one in millions on the screens of the latest and greatest AAA titles. Pixel wants to harken back to a simpler time, when pixels really meant something other than a spec on a monitor/TV size chart and a speck on the screen. As a result, Pixel ventures back into the past when games and pixels were married to each other, an age when compressing graphical fidelity into a system required deftly manipulating the limitations of the console with every game.

Inside each console (there's quite a few) you can find a short but varied series of platforming levels, all of which are designed in such a way as to emulate the look and feel of many retro consoles and computers including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, NES, etc. Needless to say, the visual design is wonderful, simple and effective at provoking nostalgic flashbacks and is easily one of my favorite features.

In the latest update, certain nostalgic rendering effects have been put in as well, allowing you to emulate a distorted CRT television, the likes of which were often used as personal computer monitors back in the 80s, among other display types with various color palettes.

The game also takes the time and care to ape the SOUND of the emulated consoles, as well. Choosing one of them on the levels screen, each console cheerfully plays a startup chirp/noise uniquely identifiable as coming from the original thing. This console-specific treatment also extends to the levels' musical tracks, all of which are extremely reminiscent of the original soundchips.

Each console's levels and their start screens even go into specific detail on the release date, clock speed and onboard memory of the console among other things, making the game itself more and more like an easy-to-understand encyclopedia on each console's defining characteristics.

The gamepad controls in the initial release of the game were not perfect, but I'm proud to say the latest patch Xbox 360 controller support has been very improved with custom keybinding support among other things. This took out my main complaint about the game and I applaud the developer for improving it so quickly after launch.

I have, unfortunately, not played the game long enough to encounter one of the many purported hidden easter eggs in the game, but I imagine them to be just as authentic as the rest of the game's retro aesthetic and will update this review accordingly when I bump into one.

The difficulty of each of the levels are, I feel, exactly what you'd expect from games from that era: shallow learning curve, exponentially steeper difficulty curve. Expect to make multiple attempts at beating each level in one life and in the shortest time possible, although this is not necessary to complete levels and your mileage may vary in terms of how difficult the game is for you. I imagine it is necessary to unlock hidden consoles and other secrets, however.

Final verdict:

Exactly what I expected in a nostalgia title. Retrogaming buffs will probably find a lot to enjoy from this game, and I feel it's well worth the price.

Originally written October 23, 2014 on Steam