McPixel

As a 19 year old college honors student you would think that stuff like Regular Show, Adventure Time, and other dumb, over-the-top things like that wouldn't appeal. Think again. I love all those buck-wild forms of entertainment because they don't give a shit and go balls out to give you some funny and dumb outlet in a serious world. McPixel is no different.

McPixel's Indie roots are evident upon you starting the game. The first thing you'll notice is the art design pulled from apple 2 and amiga games of the 80's. The game itself is a point and click adventure game with a fast paced franticness of the Wario Ware franchise. McPixel has 4 chapters and an ending that can be reached when you 100% the previous 4 chapters. Each chapter is broken into stages of three and on your first playthrough are tasked with finding a bomb in an environment with 20 seconds on the clock in a set of six envirnments. because of the time imperative you feel a rush of excitement to click on stuff as soon as possible and try to solve the puzzle and find the bomb but this is where McPixel earns its differentiation from other games.

From the moment you start the game McpPixel makes to very clear that it isn't sane in anyway, The title screen is a meteor falling and you defuseing a bomb with a lit fuse. Instead of putting it out normally you just pee on it and then the meteor hits you and then the bomb still explodes. Everytime McPixel interacts with an object in the game you never know what hell do, sometimes if you cant interact with a person or thing without picking something up he just kicks it in the shin. McPixel makes the challenge of finding the puzzle fun by making each interaction with objects and people so buck-wild that I wanted to mess up to see what crazy thing he would do next,

Each chapter and subchapter have stages that riff off of pop culture. One in particular is a televison show chapter that has you tangling with "The Power Puff Girls" and the original "Dragonball" cartoon. Each of these stages uses the blocky art style to great effect as the characters that you see are just detailed enough to go, "Oh yeah that kinda looks like Ash Ketchum, and a Pokemon,". And because they look so crude it makes it even funnier when you see things like a sumo wrestler getting kicked in the junk and then he spits out the bomb. Or when you see Batman getting a fire exstinguisher shuved down his throat and then the exhaust just comes out his ass. McPixel is game that gives 0 fucks about jokes making sense compared to other forms of comedy and because of its absurdity it succeeds in making failure fun.

I had a great time with McPixel and it really opened my eyes to independent gaming and how creativity can be achieved by even the most absurd of means. The frantic pace and sensibilty makes this game an easy pcik up and play game suited perfectly for short bursts. This game epitomizes has attitude for days it smacks you with it hard fast into submission as quickly accept the nature of this crazy-ass world that has been created.