They Bleed Pixels

Genre: Platformer / Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

They Bleed Pixels is a challenging Platformer with Action-Platformer elements released on PC in 2012 and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game stars a young girl who comes to a strange and mysterious school and encounters an even more strange and mysterious book that give her nightmares where her hands are replaced with nasty stabbing implements and she’s forced to fight through shadowy enemies in a realm of spikes and sawblades that require dangerous feats of acrobatics to get past.

The presentation here does a lot with very little, featuring nicely-animated low-detail pixel art visuals with just a few colors, which makes the absurd amounts of blood on display even more standout as they splash, spray, and drip on every surface when you or an enemy takes damage. This is backed by a decent but forgettable chiptune soundtrack.

The gameplay here is also built on a solid foundation – there’s a nice, varied combat system here that has players using kicks to disarm and toss around enemies (often into aforementioned spikes), and strikes with stabby-hands to do damage. This game encourages players to do the former as often as possible though – spikes have the potential to do one-hit kills, and enemies take a lot of stab-strikes to down, with many putting up a defense after taking just a few hits.

Between fights, players will be jumping, double-jumping and wall-jumping their way through the game’s levels, all while dodging the aforementioned hazards. The game does a good job of balancing the combat with the platforming, but ultimately I’d say that the platforming here plays a bigger factor than combat, at least most of the time.

That’s probably for the best, because this game’s biggest flaw lies with its combat. The thing is, this game tries to be clever by making all attacks come from just one attack button, which is used in conjunction with a direction and the duration of your button press to make different types of attacks happen. Unfortunately, this ends up being too clever for its own good, and makes it all too easy to accidentally use the wrong type of attack, or in the heat of combat have your muscle memory fail you. I feel like this game should have at least given players the option to assign kick attacks to a different button than stabbing attacks, as it can be absolutely vital to use the right kind of attack at the right time.

Because of this frustration with the game’s controls, I feel like They Bleed Pixels ends up being a worse game than it could have been, and it just seems so unnecessary – if only this game hadn’t tried to do something clever with its combat it could have been a solid mix of Platformer and Action-Platformer, but with all of the attacks forced into one button, the result is that it’s a game that alternates between moments of brilliance and moments of frustration. If you’re a fan of the genre who has the patience for an odd control scheme, this game is still probably worth your while, but others may be better off looking elsewhere.

tl;dr – They Bleed Pixels is a challenging Platformer with Action-Platformer elements that has players fighting through deadly blood-soaked spike and buzzsaw-filled levels as a girl with magically-transformed stabby-hands. The core gameplay here is great, but it’s sabotaged by combat controls that force a lot of different types of attack into just one button. Fans of the genre with patience for unusual control schemes may enjoy this, but everyone else may find this too frustrating to be worthwhile.

Grade: C+

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