McPixel 3 Preview – PC – Game Chronicles

Have you ever played a mobile game that had a lot of ads?

Have you ever played a mobile game and gotten an ad for Gardenscapes that blatantly lies about what the game is about? Particularly one where you are presented with three problems such as a weedy flower patch, a broken fountain, and fresh soil that needs dug up, as well as three solutions such as a shovel, a spray bottle of weed killer, and extra concrete? By chance did you then have no choice but to watch as a mysterious hand chose to herbicide the plot of good soil, use the concrete to completely kill both the flowers and weeds, and then take the shovel to use as a blunt instrument to utterly destroy the fountain, leaving the entire scene a chaotic mess?

Well, I can’t think of any real person who would respond to a situation like that, but there is at least one video game character: the star of McPixel 3, the titular McPixel.

A somewhat crude parody of MacGyver (and, by extension, MacGruber), McPixel 3 is, ostensibly, a game about saving the day in multitudes of self-contained scenes that are all mere seconds away from disaster. While the previous game in the series, McPixel (not McPixel 2; such a game does not exist) had the pixelated protagonist struggling to defuse a bomb in each level, this game raises the stakes with multiple kinds of disasters to avert. While the demo contains a handful of explosive hazards, it also contains asteroids, a train derailing, and a plane crash as possible disasters to thwart.

However, I do use the phrase thwart liberally. You see, McPixel is… not very sensible. Or polite. Or really capable of interacting with a person in any way that isn’t comedic levels of violence, usually a kick to the groin. If you click on an item or person, it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s going to do with it. All you can really do is direct him and watch the chaos unfold. Attempt to climb a ladder with a pair of scissors? He cuts it, rendering it unusable. Click a sausage on a grill? He just kind of drops it into his pants. That sort of thing.

The solution(s) to these levels are almost never expected but finding the Proper Ending for each scene is only part of the game’s appeal. Instead, every little thing and combination of things you can click on generally has a comedic ending to the scene that results in your untimely demise. Since that’s part of the game’s draw, I’ll avoid going too much into the details, but there were definitely a few gags that got a good laugh out of me. There’s even a few minigames that taking certain actions can trigger that mix up the gameplay somewhat.

However, there were a few things that, while not really actively bad, I found annoying. The most significant hurdle I feel is the fact that it can be difficult to find interactions you have missed. This is for a few reasons: Firstly, each scene plays out consecutively, one after the other, until you either solve (or 100% complete) one of them, at which point it is removed from the queue and you move on. This means seeing the same cutscenes and having to take some of the same actions over and over again if you want to see everything, failed a minigame (some of which were a bit frustrating at times) or just couldn’t find the “right” way to finish an area.

The game does try to rectify this; If you play a scene enough times, a tooltip comes up that tells you that pressing a certain button will reveal all clickable areas on the screen, and that right clicking will skip a cutscene if you’ve already seen it. Both of these things are helpful! However, there’s a few things it will not skip. For example, a few scenes have multiple areas in them, or hidden additional areas. If you fail one of those scenes and want to go back, you need to spend several seconds doing the steps necessary to get those scenes prepared. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up. Not to mention potentially having to redo a minigame a few times if you can’t get it in short order, or if it has multiple endings.

Additionally, the breakneck speed of the game can make it hard to remember what you’ve tried and what you haven’t. It doesn’t help that some actions will immediately end the scene in a failure (or success) and it’s not clear whether clicking someone will, say, have McPixel kick them in the groin or smash them into an object for the remainder of the scene, ending it in a fail and shunting you off to the next wacky situation that requires you to shove everything you were just thinking about to one side and frantically try to remember which thing you haven’t used on that one thing yet.

There is an interface that keeps track of what gags you’ve seen, but it only pops up when it’s checking some things off, and I couldn’t find a way to show it aside from that. It would be nice to have some kind of visual indicator to show if something’s been done before, maybe also showing that doing such and such crazy thing will end the scene before you try it somehow. Or perhaps even a Henry Stickmin-esque flowchart/scene selector interface to skip some of the waiting

In closing, McPixel 3 is, in its current state, a fun, slightly unhinged time. While going for 100% completion or looking for solutions can be somewhat frustrating at times, if you’re ok with a bit of waiting it can be worth it to hunt for a few more japes and jokes amongst the confusion.