A Pixel Story Review

The Manchester company, Lamplight Studio, created a game that BAFTA had labelled as a game to be watched and boy were they ever right! Back in 2012 The Games Commissioner for Channel 4, Colin Macdonald, gave the studio £25,000 for development of A Pixel Story and you can tell that Lamplight put their heart and soul into making this game.

While A Pixel Story has quite a few clichés that are common in platformer games, they are actually what make the game so brilliant. If you ever wanted a history on video games and their progression throughout the years, then let Pixel Story take you on a rollercoaster ride from the 8-bit genre to modern bullet hell games.

You play as “The Chosen One”, tasked to save the system which you live in from a mysterious figure known as “the operator”. You are aided by a fellow program named Search and quite a few other friends. With the aid of a magical hat you are able to defeat many of the tasks and puzzles set to you by the enemy. The magical hat allows you to leave it behind and then regardless of where you are, teleport back to it. The funny thing is that while this may sound like a gimmick it actually gave me a sense of accomplishment with each level that I completed. Using this mechanic had me rethink my entire way of avoiding and circumventing the traps that were set out for me.

Your goal in the game is to avoid the multitude of traps waiting for you and collect memory gems in order to move to the next stage. You will also come across quests in which a character will ask you to go help someone in exchange for a memory gem. The quests are actually quite humorous and are very original, including helping a man collect moonlight or some other hidden treasure.

While quite a few of the platforming challenges will only have you stumped for a couple minutes, the challenge rooms will have you wishing you were back playing Super Meat Boy on the hardest difficulty. Seriously, these rooms are insanely hard and had me pulling the hair from my head as it took me far more than a couple of minutes to even come close to finishing a single challenge room.

When it comes to the artwork and level design I beg of anyone who tries this game out, do not be off-put by the first few levels because of how archaic they may seem. That is the entire purpose behind this game. As you progress through the game the levels grow and change, just like gaming has. This makes A Pixel Story unique as the game actually evolves and develops as you play through it.The game consists of four unique generations that make you feel as if you are scrolling through video game history. The first generation looks exactly like an 8-bit Mario game, as you progress to the second gen the game becomes revamped and feels like an entirely different experience from the first.

The game even has memorable content in its music score. The music in A Pixel Story is fantastic and brought me back to my early gaming days as a kid. The tone for each stage of the game is perfectly fitted to match the genre and age that the level would have come from. I found myself getting lost in the tracks when I should have been trying to beat the level.

After a few levels I found myself in a bedroom which acts as your central command. This room serves as a way for you to move about the map to places that you have visited before. This saves you quite a bit of time from backtracking as you can quickly move about the map to hand in a quest or to grab a missed collectible. Your bedroom also serves as a painful reminder that you are missing collectibles which gives you a nice incentive to go back and play through levels for collectibles and trophies.

If you are looking for a fun blast to the past platformer that has a truly unique theme behind it, then A Pixel Story is for you. The game both looks and sounds great especially from a studio that needed a grant to get the game on the roll. The game takes a humorous and in-depth look into the progress video games have made since the early days of Pong, while also challenging you to beat some of the hardest levels I have ever played in a platformer.