Do yourself a favour: play some levels before you read the help in McPixel. You may not know what to do at first when the point-and-click game by indie developer Mikolaj ‘Sos’ Kaminski starts up.
That’s OK. You’ll probably wind up triggering something very funny. Like kicking everyone in the junk.
The humour in this one-touch adventure game is so sharp and sudden that reading any instructions might spoil the guffaws. McPixel puts players in the titular role of a dude who has to prevent stuff from blowing up. Each chapter strings together five levels where you have 20 seconds to stop the scene from exploding. Sometimes you have to make a snake on a plane swallow a bomb or figure out how to douse a stick of dynamite. Whether you win or fail, you get pushed through all five sequences until they’re all complete.
McPixel‘s laughs come in crude and goofy fashion. One level has you punch a guy on a doctor’s examination in the stomach, which makes an explosive shoot out of his butt. Parodies and homages to things like Mortal Kombat and Pokémon lurk inside McPixel’s 100 levels, throwing jokes at your face in super-fast fashion. Everything feels frantic in McPixel and that’s the best thing about it. If you’re someone old enough to have enjoyed classic LucasArts games like Full Throttle, you’ll love how the game — which first came out for desktops — channels the bizarre logic demanded by old-school adventure games. The gags in McPixel follow that kind of thinking to absurd ends. Buy it. It’s freakin’ hilarious.
McPixel ($1.99) [iTunes App Store]
McPixel (free/$1.99) [Google Play]
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