Fill-A-Pix: Phil’s Epic Adventure

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Fill-A-Pix is a Puzzle game whose closest relative is probably Minesweeper, with a presentation that’s closer to games like Picross. Players are presented with a board littered with numbers, each number denoting how many filled-in spaces are next to that spot (up to 9, as this includes the numbered space itself). Using only this information, players must fill in the correct squares to complete each puzzle.

The game thankfully starts players with a pretty good tutorial showing them how to play, and once you get going it’s pretty easy to get into. The game even provides a handy auto-fill button that automatically fills in or voids out all unmarked surrounding squares of a number that already has the correct number of filled-in squares, or whose remaining squares must all be filled in.

That said, this auto-fill button does make it easier to brute-force a puzzle, simply clicking on every number without thinking about it. In fact, for many puzzles you’ll likely stick to just using this button, simply looking for the squares it can be used on. This makes the game pretty simple and not very engaging, and you never quite get that “Eureka!” moment you often have in puzzle games like these.

Another issue is the lacking options – there doesn’t appear to be any way to restart a puzzle until you complete it outright, which can be frustrating if you’re a perfectionist who wants to complete every puzzle without making a mistake – the moment you make a mistake, you can’t just restart, you have to complete the whole damn thing before you can try again.

For the presentation, the game’s puzzles are pretty plain and straightforward black-and-white grids, but the game tries to add some flavor by surrounding the puzzle with the cartoon character Phil and his world-spanning adventures. Tries to. Unfortunately, I don’t care for Phil’s character design, and I care even less about his pointless “adventure”, which has all the charm of watching a vacation slide show of a boring guy you don’t know.

In the end, Fill-A-Pix is a decent puzzle game, albeit not one that’s very engaging, and the attempt to add character to the game with the titular Phil backfires thanks to how dull he and his “adventure” are. Still, if you’re looking for a Puzzle game that’s a bit like Minesweeper, you’ll probably find Fill-A-Pix to your liking.

tl;dr – Fill-A-Pix is a Puzzle game similar to Minesweeper, with players using numbers on a grid to determine how many squares around each number are filled in. It’s decent but not terribly engaging, and the attempt to add character by making it about the titular Phil only detracts from the game. What’s left is still a decent, but not great, Puzzle game.

Grade: C+

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