PIXELS is a turn-based monster collector RPG. The monsters in this world are called PIXELS. Every PIXEL has its own type (fire, water, electric, etc.) with strengths and weaknesses against other certain types, i.e., water beats fire, electric beats water, and so forth. The trainers in this world are called coaches. You control a middle-aged man coach with a magnificent mustache. There are a few environments currently - the overworld, the battle environment, the town, and the question mark. The battle environment and town have their own sub classifications, as well.
The overworld is a randomly-generated hex grid with branching paths. When you move to the next grid it'll switch to either a battle state, a town, or a random event. You can see what each hex is going to be before you go there so you can decide from the beginning of the game what path you want to take to the end. It's not an open-world exploratory type game and you may only ever move forward, not back.
When you enter a battle state it can either be a wild PIXEL or a random coach with multiple PIXELS to fight against. Based on the UI it looks as though you and your opponent can have up to six PIXELS on hand to fight with. In the beginning your PIXELS start with two moves, but as they level they gain more actions. In battle you may choose up to four actions even though the PIXEL can learn more actions than that, though they need to be set up before battle. Actions consist of attacking, buffing, and debuffing. You also have general actions like item usage for healing and revives or switching out PIXELS mid-battle. The battle keeps going until all PIXELS on one side are defeated. If you lose you have to restart the game from the beginning, losing all PIXELS and money you've gained, except for shards which are a secondary permanent currency which I'll detail later. If you win against a wild PIXEL sometimes they'll offer to join your team and you may choose to accept or decline. I haven't tried declining yet because it's always better to have the advantage of numbers to survive in this world.
The town is where you can fully heal and revive your PIXELS at the clinic and stock up on supplies like healing elixirs and revive potions. Luckily, the clinic is free, but items cost money which you earn from battles. The town also acts as a checkpoint where you start from when you quit the game. In some towns there are arenas where you must fight all three coaches before you can leave. The arena battles are no different than the random coach encounters in the wild, except the cash rewards are much greater, and the coaches have more personality. In between battles you can heal and restock up on supplies, so you don't need to fight through an entire gauntlet nonstop because like in the wild if you lose you have to restart the game.
The question mark is a random event consisting of either a shop with slightly better items than what you'd find in town, a PIXEL storage, or a gambling event where you can buy a loot box or roll a dice, though I haven't rolled the dice yet so I have no idea what it does. The last time I was able to afford a loot box I got a healing elixir for my trouble. There may be other random events, but I haven't run into any others yet.
When you get to the end of the overworld you get to fight the super boss and have all your PIXELS beaten to a pulp and get to restart the run. That's game set.
The purplish color palette works really well with the rest of the character and environmental designs. The animations are also fun and cute to look at. I like the battle music, it's catchy. The way PIXELS have their individual triangles in their mesh appear and disappear is really well done.
One of the things the game has a few issues with is balance. I can't even imagine what it'd be like to balance a game like this especially as the number of PIXELS goes up. The random number generator has been working against me more often than not, where I have a set of PIXELS getting one shot as I summon them and their speed is lower than the enemy PIXEL's so they can't get a move in before getting wrecked, or if I get an attack in first it's at chip damage and then my PIXEL gets wrecked in one or two turns. I don't know that I like getting hit for 3 damage and then all of a sudden for 70. The turn order also depends on the battling PIXELS' speeds, so the ordering can also be the difference between victory and defeat.
There are various status effects that have also worked against me more than it worked against the enemy. I don't think the game is adding a bonus modifier to the enemy's RNG or a negative modifier to mine, I'm just strangely unlucky in all things real and virtual. There are effects that do damage-over-time, prevent movement, evasion, or any combination of those. Evasion makes it much harder to land a hit, but not impossible. Dizzy is an infuriating one because you have a high chance of fumbling your own attack and damaging yourself. Guess what happened a lot due to my unnaturally low luck? Currently, there are no items that relieve status effects, though a PIXEL or two may have a high level action that relieves status effects, but that's in the late game whereas these effects can be applied from the early game.
During battle each action has a limited number of points dictating how much the action can be used per battle and using the same action multiple times in a row makes the action more expensive to use. The cost can be reset by choosing a different move, but the cost-benefit of doing so has to be taken into consideration, such as do I attempt to do the finishing blow and have fewer attacks for next set of enemy PIXELS or risk losing health or even a PIXEL by choosing a buff/debuff to reset the attack cost? Using items also doesn't seem to reset costs which seems a bit unintuitive to me. When you run out of points for actions the only thing you can do is flail which is really low chip damage. I've gotten into a couple battles where both PIXELS ran out of points and so we flail until one of us dies, with me having the advantage of higher health. I like that the AI can also run out of actions.
Items are very expensive relative to the amount of money you earn. When you go back into the wild you'll probably only be carrying one or two healing elixirs and maybe one revive before you can restock at the next town or random event shop, or not because it's unaffordable. Also, because of the aforementioned one hit kills sometimes healing is pointless because an enemy PIXEL who chip-damaged you earlier will one shot you from full health when you could've weakened it for your next PIXELS to deal with. There are PIXEL actions that heal, but most of them are for such tiny amounts it's almost pointless.
Although there's no explicit saving system there's an implicit one where you go back to the last town you were at when you quit the game. However, when all your PIXELS are defeated you have to start all over from the beginning, losing all your money and PIXELS in the process. I'm not a fan of this because of how chance-based all the battles were in my experience. I was able to get around this by exiting the game when I was about to lose a battle and starting over from the last town checkpoint. The design attempts to mitigate this by having a second currency called shards that doesn't get taken upon loss and can be used to upgrade all your future runs with things like always starting with a healing elixir or revive among other things. However, they're also very expensive and require many runs to afford any of them.
I think the game shows a lot of promise, but has a lot of work ahead of it to really make it shine. I like the art direction. The balance is what will make or break the game. Get that down and it won't really matter too much how the rest of the game will be. It's quite impressive what this tiny team was able to achieve with a 3D game.
Good luck, developer!
