McPixel 3 Review – PC

McPixel 3 isn’t a game I thought I’d be opening again, much less writing about, but here we are. The nearly-IP-rights-infringing-hero’s newest game is here, having skipped straight past 2 and going straight to 3. This game’s… strange, and you could change very little about the plot and make the protagonist some kind of horror movie villain with the amount of unhinged stuff he does, so this is your only warning. You have your chance to back out. Look I’ll even answer the most important question right here right now.

Yes, you can pet the dog.

Okay. Last warning. This game gets away with a lot with its simplistic aesthetic. If you’re good with that, well… with much trepidation, here we go.

McPixel is, for those who haven’t played it or seen my review of the demo, a simple game where you play as a little dude called McPixel, first name unknown. Or maybe his full name is Mc Pixel? It’s unclear. Regardless, Mr Pixel is an average everyday person just like you or me who needs help navigating regular social situations with poise and grace- pffft no, no I can’t put that down with a straight face.

McPixel is a dangerous unhinged nutjob whose life is inexplicably full of trying not to explode. He seems to have the knack for getting himself in trouble, without so much the crucial knack of getting himself out of it again. Each level, you find Mr Pixel (if that is his last name, with his first presumably being MC) in a new situation. You can then click on things! And then he will do… something. It’s hard to tell what before you point him in the general direction, but if it’s a person, chances are he will go straight for violence, usually kicking them in the crotch.

Ostensibly, according to the game’s instructions, the goal is to make sure McPixel survives each level. Sometimes this involves defusing the bomb without casualties. Other times… well. The instructions paint a pretty clear picture.  However, despite the insistence that your goal is survival, there’s a few levels where you can get several wrong solutions to a given problem that don’t kill Mc, or some where he isn’t in danger in the first place (like the one where he is on a game show or playing chess). Whatever. That’s semantics. What matters is there’s problems and you’re here to make sure this red shirt gets the desired outcome of each little scene he finds himself in.

Kind of like the Henry Stickmin games though, there’s a lot of humor to be had in failure. It’s fun to watch as Mc will just go around stirring up chaos with no provocation, even to his own detriment. There are a few sequences that caught me delightfully off guard and I’m glad I went out of my way to see.

So, good news: there’s a lot of content here. There are twelve main level packs, with each level containing a lot of silly chaos to discover. Some of them even have secrets within. The game actually has pretty impressive pixel art as well. There are sequences where things will tilt or rotate, and they don’t just use a shortcut like rotating the image in photoshop- there’s no weird, slanted pixels or anything. There’s a city map you can explore to find new locations to throw Mc “McPixel” Pixel at, and the game makes it easy to go back to previously found rounds so you can encounter every gag and bad end you want.

There are some improvements from the demo as well! Right clicking will skip darn near any scene you’ve already seen. There’s a fast travel system to get to any level pack you’ve found already, including the secret Steve rounds (which don’t have a win or lose condition, just silliness). The city map is big and has a lot to explore, with things like a costume shop and water coolers Sir Pixel of McIngton can… uh, pour down his own pants, I guess.

However, there are still downsides.  Several of the scenes have a lot of different components. It’s hard to find every possible gag without some indicator of which ones you’ve tried, which ones you haven’t, what things you’ve already tried when you’re holding a hammer, and so on. You don’t have a lot of control over which level you’re playing within a given pack; the first time you play one, you go through every scene in the playlist on loop until you manage to win each one, with cleared maps getting filtered out. The next time, each scene that you’ve found every gag on will be filtered out, with the remaining scenes looping until you’ve 100%’d them all. So, if you manage to find all the gags in a scene on your first run through, if you want to see it again for whatever reason you’re unable to without also completing every other scene in the set.

It can be hard to feel good about finishing a scene sometimes too. One level solution requires you to assault and rob a homeless man. Another requires you to grab a sleeping construction worker and throw him off the building he’s on. Another means running into a courtroom with a bomb, terrifying everyone inside so they rush out in a panic… taking the bomb with them and dying in the explosion. But McPixel’s fine at least, so yay?  While this game does have a lot of comic violence and lewdness, it just kind of toes the line between comic and distressing if you think about it too long, is what I’m saying. Your mileage may vary.

The sound also kind of sticks out. There are only a few musical tracks in the game and very few sound effects. Of course, original McPixel was like this too, but it seems a lot more notable in this version? Seeing a building explode or a helicopter crash without even a bit of noise from the game just strikes me as off. The only thing that reliably gets a sound is the sitcom themed levels where your actions are followed by annoying low-fi canned laughter.

There’s also the fact that there’s just a weird number of things in this game that take a weirdly long time? Navigating the world map is fun at first, but it’s at least ten screens wide and finding anything of note will send you back to the spawn point on the edge of the map. You spend coins to open up new level sets, and while earning them is easy, it takes a good 10 to 30 seconds to open any of the paywalls while the number on them ticks down to zero. Even viewing your level stats at the end of the level means waiting for them to tally up.

This leads into my biggest gripe with the game: a good 20% of the gags seem like filler.  Not to say that none of them are worth seeing! It just seems like one out of every five or so scenes, especially in 4-1 and 4-3, are the same game over with minute differences (ie, picking answer B vs answers A, C, and D, losing the game show). And since the game considers them new content, you’re not allowed to skip them until they finish.

McPixel 3 is not a game that is respectful of your time. There’s a sequence late in the game where you’re swimming through an underwater maze. It takes a good couple of minutes. There’s turns that, if taken, aren’t simply dead ends but one-way paths that send you back to the beginning. There are times where you’ll click on something and be shown a still image for ten seconds you can’t skip out of until the game says you’re ready. There are a few multi-scene levels where you need to do things repeatedly to see every permutation of stuff, some of which is just “after kicking someone in the crotch, you also whack them with a shovel”.

One level near the end is simply a straight line through no less than EIGHT screens of doors. You can click on them if you want, but none of them have anything important inside. Sometimes your dude will pee in one of them. Once you get through these eight screens, you find a button… that kills you immediately when you press it. When you respawn and come back you are greeted with EIGHT MORE SCREENS before you get to the thing you actually need to do.

For a game that was originally fairly fast-paced it has a lot of ways of encouraging you to waste a lot of time.  Granted, there’s some really good stuff in there too. I’m not going to spoil it all, but I was thrilled with some of the unexpected gameplay changes and minigames that occurred, as well as some of the level sets like 4-2 and one themed around different old video games. There’s even one where you play as various Not-McPixels that seems to indicate that the rest of the world is as mad as the title character himself. All of these are incredible.

Honestly though, at the end of the day it’s up to you if it feels worth it to sift through the weird frantic slowness and filler to get to the good stuff. Personally, I don’t think I could recommend McPixel 3. Feel like playing it anyway? Be my guest. Hope you have fun. And try not to urinate on absolutely everything.

GOSH I’m so glad this game is too low-res to show anything in detail.

Zachary is an aspiring writer and game designer, currently working on his first novel which is tentatively titled I Played a Cursed VHS But Paused it Before the Ghost Could Fully Emerge and Now I Have an Angry Witch as a Roomate (VHS Witch for short). The first few chapters can be found on Itch.io.

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