Another game beaten! That makes six games this week, compared to my 20+ day absence when I was playing Valkyria Chronicles. It’s almost surreal how much shorter other genres are when compared to RPGs.

• Adventures of Pip
  

  5 hours playtime

  13 of 20 achievements

This game is an action platformer (don’t let that “puzzle” tag fool you). You play as a “pixel” that can “increase” its “resolution” by killing one of the blue glowing enemies found throughout the game. You jump higher and can move through small passages as a pixel, move faster and can wall jump at mid-res, and can break blocks and move stones at high-res. To lower your resolution, you just have to hold the B button. It’s a solid concept, although the game seems to have parts designed just for the sake of making you shift between forms. I lost count of how many times a room would end with a passage that could only be passed in pixel form, only to have a blue glowing enemy right at the start of the next room. It’s as if the rooms were designed individually, and they were just linked by difficulty to form the levels (as opposed to the levels being designed as a cohesive whole).

My biggest complaint with the game is that its difficulty curve is very low. For example, the game doesn’t even introduce the high-res form until world 2: an hour into the game. Apparently, the game thinks its mechanics are so complex that you need to spend a quarter of the game getting used to switching between low and mid-res, then spend another fourth of the game getting used to the full set of mechanics. Personally, I think its world 2 difficulty should’ve started in world 1 and its world 4 difficulty should’ve started in world 2 because world 4 was where the game started to get fun (too bad you have to go through 65% of the game to reach it); I was just going through the motions until then.

Honestly, the game almost gets less difficult as it progresses. For one example, your max HP increases after each boss, á la The Legend of Zelda, and you can also buy items to increase your max HP (as well as buy an item that cuts damage caused by enemies in half). As another example, the first boss gave me the most trouble since the enemies you need to jump on to damage the boss would appear in different locations each time the boss was hit (on top of the boss shooting more projectiles); in contrast, I beat all the other bosses on my first try (except the final boss, whom I beat on my second try).

EDIT: For comparison’s sake, the second boss is a spiked wheel that just rolls along until you slash it with your sword (only available at high-res), at which point it tries to charge at you, hits the wall, and becomes vulnerable. When you damage it, the cycle repeats; no new pattern like with the first boss. It comes off as if the game is still trying to get you used to how the high-res form works (unlike the first boss which came across as an actual boss), but since it’s not that complicated to get the hang of, the fight is just boring and forgettable (I literally forgot to talk about this when I first made this post and had to edit it in later). If it had introduced the high-res form in the second level and had the spiked wheel as a mini-boss of said level, that would have been more appropriate, but as the boss of the second world, it’s a joke even by this game’s standards of difficulty.

However, the most egregious example of the game lacking challenge would be its tendency to make you wait on or for moving platforms, and it does this throughout the game. Not only do the platforms move fairly slowly, but most of the time a moving platform is involved, there aren’t even any enemies around to make things interesting; you’re literally just waiting for the platform to get in jumping range, then you’re waiting for the platform to move to its destination so you can jump off (and that’s not even considering the empty rooms where you have to jump across multiple moving platforms). Even if you’re more of a casual player, we can both agree that that’s just flat out boring, right? Seriously, there were times where I’d take damage just so I didn’t have to wait for the platforms (I had plenty of health).

Also, the levels are quite short (only being a few rooms long, with each room only being about 1-3 screens large). Normally, I’d be disappointed, but since it means less waiting on platforms, I say it’s a plus.

Moving on: in each level, there are three people you can save, but the game is a one-trick-pony when it comes to hiding them. You see, the people are usually hidden behind fake walls, and when they’re not, they’re just standing there, out in the open, barely on a branch from the main path (if you’re lucky, the the fake walls will lead to another room with some game-play in between you and the person). For the ones hidden behind fake walls, there’s usually a hole in the wall or the edge of a platform sticking out of the wall so that you have some idea that there’s a secret there. Other times, there’s nothing to indicate that a secret is there, and it’s blind luck whether you can find it (although you can buy one-time-use items that will beep if you enter a room with someone in it). Despite this, you can still find two to three of them just by mindlessly playing the levels like I was (the one time I saved less than two people, I still found one). Also, as far as I can tell, saving people does nothing game-play wise; it’s just for achievements and so you can see what the top kickstarters wanted to say.

By the way, I saw people complain about the boss of world 4, but I actually quite liked that the game was willing to do something that complex with its mechanics (especially after seeing what the rest of the game had to “offer” up to that point). As I stated earlier, I kinda wish the game was more like that and less “wait for some more moving platforms.”

Something else I feel the need to note is that the game has a map screen that you walk across to access its levels, á la SMB3, but since there are no branching paths, it just kinda there for the sake of it. The game will also have points on the map that aren’t levels, which really just exacerbates my previous point. It’s not that big of an issue, but I would’ve preferred a basic cursor setup that would let me navigate the map quickly by tapping the button.

Overall, this is another game that’s hard to recommend. It might seem like I didn’t talk about much, but that’s because there really isn’t much to talk about. There aren’t any major problems with the game, but in its attempt not to be too frustrating, it went too far the other way and is just kinda dull. Plus, it’s a 4.5 hour game for $15, so even if you’re a more casual player, I still recommend waiting for a sale.