The Adventure of Pixi: The 3 Stones

[h1] The 3 Stone Problem[/h1] [i]This review contains spoilers [/i] [i]A review copy was provided via Steam Curator for free [/i] [b]TL;dr:[/b] A retro-style, very short adventure game about collecting jewels to return colour to the world. [b]Recommended [/b] [table] [tr] [td]Platforms played on[/td] [td]Windows desktop Steam Deck [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Pros[/td] [td] Nice black & white pixel style, which gets better once you unlock the colours for the game. Game doesn’t overstay its welcome. [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Cons[/td] [td] Story ends suddenly and at the end you just rush through the final dungeon. [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Things to know?[/td] [td] The game is quite short. The game has multiple endings. The original language of the game is French with English translation. As such the game has some typos in the English translation [/td] [/tr] [/table] [hr][/hr] [h2]Overview of the Story and Gameplay[/h2] The Adventure of Pixi: the 3 Stones (L’aventure de Pixi: la quete des 3 pierres) was originally released in 2011. The developers went back to the game and remade the game completely in 2025 using EasyRPG including new soundtrack. The game tells the story of world that has lost its colours, Pixeleuh and the Pixel race who are content with their life, except for one, The Old Man, who decided to spend his entire life decoding records of those who came before the Pixel race. The Old Man inspired another person, called Pixi (who seemingly wears a different wig every day) and together they made (useless) research on the world. One day the Old Man found records of colours and decides to send Pixi on a quest to reclaim three stones that house all the colors. The Adventure of Pixi is a retro-style game with simple graphics and simple controls. You control Pixi on her quest to find the three stones. Most of the time, the camera shows you overhead view of a black and white world. As the game progresses you start to unlock more colours to make the world regain colour. In some parts of the game, the game switches to a side-view for light platforming. To move from area to another, you traverse over a world map either on foot or by ship. You are restricted to 4 directions for most of the time. The character gains actions like jump during platforming sequences. The game also features simple fighting and simple minigames to keep your journey fresh. The fight mechanics are very simple and the first fight you get is more about positioning yourself correctly than actual fighting. There are only 3 different fight mechanics in the game. The game itself doesn’t feature a journal or anything else to record, so be sure to either keep track of your quests old-school style with a notepad. The game has difficulty settings for exploration, and you can switch between them any time you want. [hr][/hr] [h2]The Tech[/h2] The Adventure of Pixi: The 3 Stones runs on EasyRPG engine, as such it runs on pretty much anything. The game always starts on full-screen and only presents language options (French, the main language, and English) on the title screen. To access other settings, the player needs to press F1 to access Engine settings. The game tells you about F1 settings in the start, but if you miss it, you won’t be told again. The setting menu features quite many different settings, some which are perhaps not necessary for the players to have. Interestingly the engine allows to change fonts and to set up startup logos (The game also has logging on by default for some reason). The engine settings allow for things like setting Scaling method, or to disable pause when losing focus. Some settings, like frame limiter, do not work. I had the frame limiter set to 60, but the game ran at 144hz. The game starts in full-screen mode by default, but you can switch to a freely resizeable window by pressing alt+enter anytime you want. The game does not support different aspect ratios, so ultra-wide users are better off running the game in windowed mode. Accessing the engine settings by pressing F1 while playing the game allows you to force the game to start by default in windowed mode. The original resolution of the game is quite small. As such the game window may appear by default small on higher resolution displays. But as mentioned before, you can easily resize the window any time you want. The game currently has a bug, where restarting the game defaults the game language to French, but it’s pretty minor and you can easily change the language in the main menu. The game supports both keyboard and gamepad inputs and allows rebinding of keys via the Engine settings. At the start of the game, you are asked if you want a tutorial for either of the input methods or if you want you can skip the tutorial completely. The gamepad tutorial gives examples for xbox layout, and I did not try the game with dualsense or other controllers. Importantly, the game has steam cloud support for saves. [h3] Steam Deck experience [/h3] The game has native linux support, however, I could not get the game running while using the native linux version. Switching to proton fixed the issue for me. As the game does not have resolution options, the default experience is to have black bars on side. The energy usage is between 6.5-7w on steam deck LCD, giving you enough juice to finish the game multiple times. Using the speed up feature however is incompatible with Steam Deck and lowers the fps down to 3 on the world map. Hopefully the issues on Deck can be addressed by a future update. [h2]Miscellaneous[/h2] [b]DLC:[/b] The game has soundtrack DLC, which is divided to 3 different discs, in total 38 tracks. The Soundtrack looks like it includes SFX effects as well as the music. [b]Achievements:[/b] The game has no achievements at the time of writing. [hr][/hr] [h2]My opinions[/h2] The game itself is quite short, it can be finished easily in less than 2 hours, but just pushing forward means that you will lose on hidden stuff. The game features multiple different endings based on how much you explored and did side-quests. My first playthrough ended after roughly 1 hour 40 minutes and I had a completion percentage of 66%. I liked the retro style graphics. The game itself isn’t anything exceptional. However, the game does most of its stuff quite well apart from the fights that I felt needed much more work. I enjoyed my brief time with the game and finished it. As such I would [b] recommend this game [/b] [hr][/hr]

The Adventure of Pixi is a sweet, heartfelt tale about a young pixel girl seeking the answer to a mystery. It's a relatively short runtime - I achieved the true ending in about 4 hours - but I honestly love shorter, satisfying experiences like this. My game backlog is so long as it is! The storyline was engaging and kept me coming back over a few evenings to see it through, and the music was excellent throughout. The gimmick of changing wigs out is a cute touch (and actually story-relevant!) There's also a cat-seeking mini-game which resulted in my favorite reward of the whole game. The puzzle elements aren't overly complicated, but were enough to make me stop and think them through. I only got stuck once, and honestly, that was more just me overthinking a situation. I didn't run into any bugs or glitches during gameplay, only a minor issue at the start where the language reverts from English to French. It's easy to see how to fix it on the menu, so it never caused me any problems. It was genuinely touching to see the world come alive in color as I went through this charming tale! It's plain a lot of love and effort went into it, and I'd recommend giving it a try.