Developed/Published by: Pastagames 
Released: October 8th, 2014
Completed: 24th October, 2014
Completion: Hmm. You can’t really beat this, I just played the main arcade mode a lot and stopped.
Trophies / Achievements: 47%

Oh dear, oh dear. It’s been a tough few weeks here at exp. Towers, with the last batch of games we’ve been playing all being… pish, to be honest. And we quite like the plucky chaps at Pastagames, who’ve made (notably) Arkedo Series 03: Pixel and Pix n’ Love Rush, which are both pretty durn charming retro-inspired titles, so we dipped into Pix The Cat in the hope it would lift the doldrums.

I, uh, don’t like Pix The Cat, though. I feel sorta bad about it! Best described as a rough reimagining of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (that’s the second one with the ghost trails) you play Pix (the cat), who has to (for reasons obscure) hatch duck eggs by walking over them then drop said hatched ducklings off in particular zones. This is complicated by the fact he can’t walk into his own trail of ducks (or they all explode) or start dropping them off before he’s hatched all the eggs (because then he loses his bonus.) It’s a game about quickly working out the best route through the screen—or being able to wing it well enough—performing that and then moving to the next screen, getting faster and faster until you hit fever time and everything is worth loads of points, you’re going really, really fast, and if you hit one thing you lose it.

It sounds pretty good! Simple, yet solid. However, this is not the case. You see, while it’s inspired by Pac-Man clearly, with strict, Pac-Man-me-do controls, it’s got very open levels. This is a subtle complaint, but you know how in Pac-Man you’re always in a tunnel? it means that when you have to make a turn, you’re always sure you’re going to turn down the route you aim, even if you’re going really, really fast—because there will be a buffer between tunnels (the, er, not-tunnel bit.) In Pix The Cat, you’re often having to make very fast turns, even in instant zig-zags, to avoid hitting stuff like drop-off zones or enemies, and it’s super frustrating to suddenly miss an egg, or screw up your entire chance of a perfect because you turned a fraction too soon or too late. In fact I’d say 100% of my mess-ups are because of that. Now, you can easily say “well, you just need better reactions.”But my thoughts are more on the line of “why is this more fun than, say, designing the levels to avoid this problem?” I don’t think it is.

(You might say “but Snake has wide open levels, and that’s fine!” again I refer to the level design—successful versions of Snake don’t litter the level with things to avoid in difficult zig-zags as well as your own tail. So there.)

It’s got this one “main” arcade mode, which is again, like Pac-Man, in that you basically do the same levels in the same order every time. Now, they do change slightly. Very slightly. But they’re not different in any meaningful way. And there’s still a timer. As a result, the game reveals itself to be about absolutely perfecting performance through memorisation in order to get a high score. It’s so hard, actually, to get a good score that the game is entirely about not making a single error, hitting fever time and never losing it (which you won’t manage, it’s bloody hard). This is unfortunate! Because there’s a daily challenge mode, with a… I’d imagine random, but I’m not sure, level where you first time through aren’t going to know what’s coming and have to just muddle through as best you can. It’s more… roguelike-likey and I guess therefore it’s interesting how the seeping roguelike-likeyness of games these days means that ones that don’t do it seem at a disadvantage. I don’t really see why the main mode of this is so locked to memorisation and repetition rather than being at least a bit easier and more random to reward skilful play. It’s really weird, honestly.

Oh, it also does this thing that seems clever, that you “zoom” deeper and deeper into the screen as each level is a tiny part of a bigger level, but it looks all wrong because the tiny levels don’t… ah, god, I’m going to describe this wrong technically, but they’ve got a higher pixel density than the level you’re playing (or something) so it looks really, really bad and incongruous. Boo to that, man.

Pix The Cat just doesn’t work! On any level! It’s like they had a lot of good ideas, but got them all very slightly wrong. Like they all sat down to program, and put their hands on the keyboard one key to the left. Ah well.

Will I ever play it again? No. It’s too hard to unlock the “dessert” mode (hard, basically) and not rewarding enough to make me keep trying. And it’s got two other modes, “nostalgia” and “laboratory” which are full of short individual levels but I just could not bring myself to care.

Final Thought: You can play the daily challenge mode more than once each day. I mean, if that isn’t an example of not quite getting it I don’t know what is.