About.com Rating

Pros: Clever premise, solid design, amusing story, stupendous score.
Cons: Checkpoints are sometimes too far apart.

It’s tough to be a single pixel in a 16-bit world where the higher defined use their recognizable features to sneer at lowly pixels. Yet in the retro 2D puzzle-platformer The Adventures of Pip, a pixel turns out to be the greatest hero of all.

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Developed and published by: Tic Toc Games
Genre: Puzzle-platformer.
For ages: 10 and up.
Platform: Wii U
Release Date: June 04, 2015
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The Basics: From Low-Rez to Slightly Higher Rez and Back

The game begins as a princess is kidnapped by a witch. Pip, a single pixel on the lowest rung of resolution-based social order, heads out to save her.

At first, Pip is a simple red block that can awkwardly walk, jump, and glide a little. But he learns that jumping on glowing creatures will add to his pixel count, allowing him to shift to 8 and 16-bit version of himself.

In Pip’s world, pixels have power. In his 8-bit form he can cling to walls, as a 16-bit Pip he can push heavy objects. But pixels also have mass, and while 1-pixel Pip can float, and 8-bit Pip can climb, in his highest evolution he is slower and heavier. Much of the game revolves around deciding which form of Pip will get the job done.

That job is made harder by fireballs, spiked paths, and myriad creatures that attack or block your path. You can jump on creatures to destroy them, or sometimes for other reasons, as when certain flying things will drop something that temporarily freezes lava.

Level design is excellent, offering something challenging but fair.

The difficulty ramps up slowly but inexorably, and for the most part stayed in my sweet spot - enough to make me swear but not so much that I want to throw the controller across the room. The game didn’t leave my comfort zone until the final of the game’s 5 worlds (6 if you include the one that just has a couple of shops). The first level of that final world was wildly difficult, and after struggling it for a while I decided that I had got 11 hours of wonderful fun out of the game and there was no reason to have it ruined for me by a torturous ending. This was where I was most annoyed by the sparsely-spaced checkpoints; I probably could have gone through the level if I didn’t have to keep struggling with the same difficulties over and over on my way to new challenges.

Beyond the Basics: Villagers to Save and a Score to Savor

As you explore the game you find treasure chests whose contents will allow you to buy special items. I didn’t find most of these useful – I spent all my money on improving my health or getting items that would increase my profit so I could improve my health more. Often I would often ignore chests, because I never felt money was that important and the chests were rarely that interesting to find.

I was somewhat more interested in saving the villagers who were hiding in secret passageways. I always like saving people, and some presented interesting mini-puzzles.

While The Adventures of Pip hews visually to an earlier era of gaming, the same cannot be said for its music, which is lush and fully orchestrated. The score is not as varied or quite as memorable as something like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, but it is a remarkably polished symphony that makes the game feel far more epic than it actually is.

The Verdict: A Must-Have for Platforming Fans

The Adventures of Pip is an interestingly meta retro game that both mocks the conventions of old-school games and neatly plays with the nature of pixeled existence. It is tremendously fun to play, and strikes a blow for pixels everywhere.