Games review: A Pixel Story
A Pixel Story is a challenging 2D platformer that shows the graphical evolution of platform gaming over the last 30 years.
The game begins when the character - who is a simple ball in a game of pong - is slowly brought into the 8-bit world with visuals that wouldn't have looked out-of-place in the late 80s. Soon enough our friend 'pong' as I've labelled him, is informed about the terror facing the 'system' and it's obviously down to pong to save the gaming world.
Soon enough, pong is chasing down a seagull who has stolen the magical hat. These early sections consist of learning the speed and balance of the game before you finally track down the hat, and obtain the ability to teleport to wherever you drop your hat.
It's a novel idea, and works well as you progress through various levels passing gaps that you otherwise couldn't, or using the hat as a respawn point for difficult jumps. It's around this point when the diversity of A Pixel Story really starts to shine, while many will see it as a basic puzzle-platformer.
You'll soon be moving on to more of a 90s 16-bit theme, with clearer visuals, but a very distinct relevance to the earlier sections. This leap in generation isn't particularly explained at first, and apart from the odd blurb or review, some gamers will head into A Pixel Story completely oblivious of the forthcoming generation leaps.
A good hour into the game and you'll be working your way through, collecting large gems to progress and trying to progress onto the next stage of evolution which resembles the 32/64 bit era.
It's fairly predictable, but the challenge rooms you'll come across really start to throw up a challenge. Many of these require a single run from start to finish, using the hat continuously to pass giant gaps or teleport past fireballs down a narrow tunnel. Some are a relatively easy gem reward, while others will absorb more time and frustration than all you've encountered before them, and while a welcome challenge for some they're just as likely to test the resolve of others.
Graphically, A Pixel Story is obviously a mixture ranging from the early through to modern days. Movement is smooth and everything works as it should, but I can't help feeling that jumping back and forth through generations might have been more appealing rather than making players wait until the closing sections to really see the best that it has to offer. The same can be said with audio - most of the game revolves around text-based speech bubbles for communication, and while the sound carefully replicates the game world around you, that's obviously not much in the opening areas.
It would have been nice to see and hear more about the characters you meet, rather than having to read about it, but it's easy to forget that this is still a world apart from many modern-day puzzle-platformers.
It's a smart move trying to capture a 30-year evolution of graphics, but I would have liked to see much more variation on the types of challenges you'll encounter, too.
It's safe to say that, with all the challenge rooms, there's plenty to work through. While it's important to examine the negatives, it's also critical to remember that what A Pixel Story does, it does very well. Many games would take a small 'room' and call it a level, but A Pixel Story places many of these within the game world and then saves the really tough ones and locks them behind progression inside the challenge rooms.
It's hard to know how well gamers will take to pong (who is, initially, just a nameless character) but there's still a fun and extremely challenging game for fans of the puzzle platform genre.
Bottom Line
A Pixel Story shows all that's good and bad about the 2D platform genre: the evolution of graphics, the game world and characters, beside the repetition and reliance on challenge to maintain concentration.
