They Bleed Pixels Review
They Bleed Pixels is a rather brutal platformer with a heavy combat aspect, it was released on the 29th of August 2012, I ended up buying it during the Halloween sale because I'd heard good things about it and I wanted a challenging shortish game. It can be bought through Steam.
The story's about a girl who goes to the "Lafcadio Academy for Troubled Young Ladies" where she finds a mysterious book which transforms her and causes nightmares, it's told through short pixel art cutscenes which are like an animated comic book.
It's not particularly important but it does influence the levels, each dream and the chapters within progress through a nightmare and where the book has been placed in an attempt to destroy it and the journey of ascendancy through that nightmare.
The key mechanics are solid, the movement and combat system work well for all the challenges you are faced with, there's also an interesting checkpoint system which relies on you collecting a bunch of points from either pickups or defeating enemies in a stylish way, then you just need to find a place devoid of enemies and hazards to cast it.
There is a lot of wall jumping so your character can grab on and slide, sometimes the jumping will require you to just drop and then use the second jump and some gaps even have spikes over the top so you need to use the dash attack instead of jumping.
The combat can be tougher to get used to because you only have a few moves and they are contextual which can be confusing when you want to stab an enemy and instead end up kicking them or doing a dash attack.
The art is rather great, the foreground environment is a silhouette while the various hazards and characters as normal sprites with white outlines set against a detailed parallax background.
All the animations of the character are surprisingly detailed for something which is just a small sprite but the rest of the enemies are pretty basic,
There's also a bunch of cool effects which convey certain things like the screen being distorted when you are low on health, having an aura surrounding the character when you have a checkpoint stored and everything explodes into red pixels when you deal damage and it also covers the environment.
The soundtrack and sound effects are fine but after hearing the character scream and die for the 10th time because you missed that jump is really grating, there's also the issue of the short and constantly looping music which you'll probably notice quickly as your frustrations builds up.
It's fine for the combat segments because you generally jump right back into that but it's bad when you die on a long platforming area and you start to feel the annoyance of doing that all again.
The sound effects that really stood out to me was the circular saw and the various dying noises, everything else was kind of simplistic.
It is a very difficult game and I do recommend using a game controller for it because the movement is rather important and I don't think it would feel as smooth otherwise.
I probably died at least 1000 times while playing it, I kept pushing because the challenge was good but it did get very frustrating when I couldn't get the patterns down before the next area I could place a checkpoint.
Overall I'd give it an 8/10
The story's about a girl who goes to the "Lafcadio Academy for Troubled Young Ladies" where she finds a mysterious book which transforms her and causes nightmares, it's told through short pixel art cutscenes which are like an animated comic book.
It's not particularly important but it does influence the levels, each dream and the chapters within progress through a nightmare and where the book has been placed in an attempt to destroy it and the journey of ascendancy through that nightmare.
The key mechanics are solid, the movement and combat system work well for all the challenges you are faced with, there's also an interesting checkpoint system which relies on you collecting a bunch of points from either pickups or defeating enemies in a stylish way, then you just need to find a place devoid of enemies and hazards to cast it.
There is a lot of wall jumping so your character can grab on and slide, sometimes the jumping will require you to just drop and then use the second jump and some gaps even have spikes over the top so you need to use the dash attack instead of jumping.
The combat can be tougher to get used to because you only have a few moves and they are contextual which can be confusing when you want to stab an enemy and instead end up kicking them or doing a dash attack.
The art is rather great, the foreground environment is a silhouette while the various hazards and characters as normal sprites with white outlines set against a detailed parallax background.
All the animations of the character are surprisingly detailed for something which is just a small sprite but the rest of the enemies are pretty basic,
There's also a bunch of cool effects which convey certain things like the screen being distorted when you are low on health, having an aura surrounding the character when you have a checkpoint stored and everything explodes into red pixels when you deal damage and it also covers the environment.
The soundtrack and sound effects are fine but after hearing the character scream and die for the 10th time because you missed that jump is really grating, there's also the issue of the short and constantly looping music which you'll probably notice quickly as your frustrations builds up.
It's fine for the combat segments because you generally jump right back into that but it's bad when you die on a long platforming area and you start to feel the annoyance of doing that all again.
The sound effects that really stood out to me was the circular saw and the various dying noises, everything else was kind of simplistic.
It is a very difficult game and I do recommend using a game controller for it because the movement is rather important and I don't think it would feel as smooth otherwise.
I probably died at least 1000 times while playing it, I kept pushing because the challenge was good but it did get very frustrating when I couldn't get the patterns down before the next area I could place a checkpoint.
Overall I'd give it an 8/10
Comments
Post a Comment