McPixel spends most of his time finding and defusing bombs in an effort to save the day. Unfortunately however, he’s not the quickest or the smartest and usually ends up doing something stupid to cause the whole place to blow up… But at least he means well.
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McPixel was originally created solely by indie developer Mikolaj ‘Sos’ Kaminski for the Ludum Dare competition, which sees developers compete to make video games within forty-eight hours. This original version can still be played online. To help promote his title, Kaminski made it available on a popular file-sharing website and invited gamers to download the torrent, stating: “I know that not everyone can afford entertainment. But everyone needs it, and even though I make games for a living I am most happy just to see people enjoy them. So today, you can download a torrent of my game. And if you like it, throw some coins in my general direction.”
What attracted me to McPixel at first was the number of ‘Let’s Play’ videos on YouTube that were covering the title and how hilarious some of them were. It’s a game that doesn’t take itself seriously and does everything possible to make sure you don’t either.
Can you spot the solution to this level? Trial and error is needed here.
The plot is pretty simple: McPixel has twenty seconds to save the day by finding a way to defuse a bomb or stop an explosion by using the objects and characters around him. For example, one level takes place at the mouth of a volcano and the eruption can only be stopped by throwing a virgin into the lava. All that’s available to McPixel is a bone, a cow and a scantily clad woman, but the solution is none of these: our hero needs only to sacrifice himself.
McPixel plays like a simple point-and-click adventure with each scene being completely different from the last. This provides a decent level of variety while the core gameplay itself can be repetitive. If you’re actually trying the beat the game instead of taking in the humour you’ll find yourself simply clicking each object in a trial-and-error fashion until you come across the solution. The difficulty between each scene varies often, and this would be a complaint if it were a more serious title.
There’s plenty of things to try here but the solution involves only one click.
The more difficult solutions to some scenes are usually found with trial-and-error but this at least means you get to see some of the funny outcomes first. However, if you’re someone who’s put off by illogical answers to puzzles and are looking for a challenge, then McPixel may not appeal to you. Stuffing a cow into a barrel of fuel is one instance.
Certain scenes will take players a lot of time to solve because particular objects are near-invisible and blend into the background. For example, at first glance the igloo level only contains an Inuit and his ice house but closer inspection reveals a very hard-to-see snowball that McPixel uses to put out the fuse on a stick of dynamite. Another particularly challenging scene involves clicking on the hat of a character so that our hero can wear it. Luckily, if you suspect an object is usable, McPixel will show an exclamation point above his head allowing for frantic clicking-around the environment to find objects.
There’s a snowball somewhere in this scene – it took me a while to find it.
I’ve learnt some of these solutions by watching gameplay videos before buying my own copy. I therefore avoided the frustration of trying to figure these out myself but maybe that’s also because I don’t have a lot of experience in point-and-click games.
As you may have already guessed by the title, the graphics of McPixel are retro and low-resolution environments definitely add some charm to the game. The background and characters are both animated but only by a few frames so the jerky, repeating animations really take you back to a time before polygons. Included in the options menu are filters that give various looks to the pixels but essentially the graphical style is consistent throughout.
The Sticky Balls pixel filter is shown here, although I found no benefit from it.
There is one aspect of McPixel that I don’t have much comment on: the soundtrack. There are a handful of tracks that play throughout the game and change as you go between scenes but there are no sound effects; this is intentional, as Kaminski found them to become annoying after some time. The tracks themselves may become tiresome after playing for a while but they can be disabled without detracting from the gameplay.
After completing a set of levels you can progress onto the next but going back over your completed levels and finding all of the gags rewards players with extras; this is entertaining although it can become a tedious process of combining every object with everything else. The extras include a level creator, farting mini game and a social area to interact with other McPixel fans. The level creator is quite complex as it involves drawing everything and scripting the events, but those that want to contribute to the game will get up-to-speed with the process fairly easily as it’s well-documented by the developer.
Getting the bomb inside something like this snake will create a controlled explosion.
McPixel doesn’t want to bring anything new to the gaming world: it just seems to want to offer a strange and comical experience that may leave some players wondering what the point is. If you have a weird sense of humour or just want to play something completely crazy then it’s definitely worth your time. As I stated earlier, it doesn’t want to be taken seriously and should’t be otherwise you’ll feel like you’ve wasted your money. I’ve been able to annoy the entire 1001-Up.com team by cheering ‘McPixel!’ at random times so to me this has definitely been worth my hard earned cash.
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