Developed/Published by: Adam Atomic
Released: 24/03/2025
Completed: 11/04/2025
Completion: Completed it. 59 dead Nazis.

PICO-8 is a wonderful thing that I haven’t ever really covered before, and it’s probably because playing PICO-8 games on PC just feels sort of… I don’t know, wrong somehow. I’m not a “webgame” guy. It feels off to be playing a game in a browser (with few exceptions.) I want to be enveloped by the game, even if it’s a wee frippery. Honour the work.

Which makes it so nice that Santa dropped a Trimui Brick handheld in my stocking last year. While it’s been a nice little thing to mess around with–and turned out to be helpful in my quest to play through, frankly, a lot of old shit–when Prince of Prussia dropped I was like “wait… can I play PICO-8 games on this thing?”

Well, it turns out you can! It’s not perfect. Initially I couldn’t get Prince Of Prussia to work. And then I did what you have to do now–watch a bunch of Youtube videos to learn anything–and I saw Retro Game Corps talking excitedly about how good the PakUI operating system was. So I tried to install that, and ended up literally bricking my Brick, requiring a full recovery.

So I decided not to chance that again and installed NextUI, which is excellent, and then put a “native” PICO-8 app on. It doesn’t allow you to use the system UI or sleep or anything, but it works which is all that matters. And so now I have a tiny system that just feels right for playing PICO-8 games. Hurrah!

(Worth noting that Lexaloffle is also creating Picotron, which is a “fantasy workstation” on which you can also probably make the playing of PICO-8 games feel “right” for you, if you are, let’s say, an American, and the Trimui Brick now costs several thousand dollars or whatever thanks to tariffs. But if you live in a cool country, you should get one of them. They’re really neat!!!*)

(*Though it’s also worth noting that if you only want to play PICO-8 games, something like the RG CubeXX might be the right pick, because it’s got a nice big square screen so sort of seems like it was almost designed for them. Feel free to shop around, there’s hundreds of these things.)

Anyway, Prince Of Prussia is a (roughly) Wolfenstein-themed Prince Of Persia demake. I haven’t got to writing up Prince Of Persia yet (though I did write up Karateka and its Making Of) but this is an interesting take on boiling down its style of platformer to its essentials. The animations are gone, but the actions are the same–if you’ve played Prince Of Persia the action of “hanging and falling” to survive a longer drop (or a drop onto spikes) is second nature, and so this will make almost instant sense, but there’s no instruction given so if you haven’t expect a lot of trial and error to work out what you’re doing.

Indeed, even combat is gone–just walk into the back of a Nazi to kill them. What makes this work is how instantaneous everything is. If you die, either by falling or getting into the line of sight of some Nazi fuckhead, you basically start again instantly, and no level is long enough that any mistake–even right at the end–causes you that much of a problem. And it feels good to kill Nazis, even if they’re like four pixels tall–Prince Of Prussia is very evocative, with some short narrative and a lighting system “fog of war” that really makes you feel like you’re creeping through a Nazi castle. Again, in a handful of pixels.

It’s a bit daft to be writing up a 15 level PICO-8 game that’s free, because you can just play it. But here’s what I’ll say: you should play it! You don’t even have to go to the lengths I did! Just play it!

Will I ever play it again? A tiny frustration I had was that I didn’t get all the Nazis, because if you touch an exit door you immediately go to the next level, no backsies. So I missed a couple by literally falling on a door. Sort of my bad. I won’t play it again, but it’s made me excited to play more PICO-8.

Final Thought: That said, I might just end up playing Benjamin Soule’s Pigments the whole time. If you’re reading this and you’ve got some favourite PICO-8 games, let me know!