They Bleed Pixels: They Sure Do

I don't know if I like indie games. I certainly buy indie games, but I don't think I've played more than 10% of the ones I now own. Between bundles, more bundles and the odd nice looking little title I end up buying lots of them. They litter my backlog. I've reviewed only a handful.

One of the games I don't like, but did play, was Super Meat Boy. There's lots to like, don't get me wrong, but SMB falls for me on two issues. One, I find it pretty outright boring. Two, it's just ugly. There's care and detail put into the sprite work, but the puerile love of raspberry jam upon every surface just felt like something a 13 year old would dream up. When I was 13 I thought rare steak was icky cuz blood came out! At this age, that protein saturated solution - Not blood, by the way - Just looks very dull indeed. I've read it's a really popular indie game, but I have a feeling it's popular in that way that doesn't matter to me. There's games people like, and there's games people like but talk about. You'll see a common thread in the latter group are, from time to time, that they feel accomplishment in finishing a difficult game.

I don't care if you've ever done anything in any single player game ever because it was difficult. What you do in your own time, man.

Anyway, I have no idea why I'd want to buy They Bleed Pixels. I thought the game's art assets looked neat, but I knew full on it was described as "like Super Meat Boy, but there's some combat". Does that sound good, knowing I didn't like the other game in the mix? Does adding combat to anything you don't like make them good games?

But then they added steam cards to They Bleed and it went on sale on GMG (which finally works with my visa, I don't know what changed but hurray!) for a price that when you get like 50 cents a card ends up mostly paying for the game. I think I'll try anything at twenty five cents. Hell I bought the RIP trilogy for a dollar and I can't even amass the effort to be mad at that.

Ok so to skip to the conclusion and sum up whether or not I think you should buy this game, the answer is nope! If you like SMB or other really hard platformers, you might enjoy this one if you dig the art style. If not, don't bother, it's not really a great game by any means. It's wonderfully stylish and enticing in a bunch of ways, but it's also just not tuned very well.

Difficulty is a pretty weird concept. It's a great deal like coding AI in FPS games - It's very easy to make an AI impossibly hard or ridiculously easy. The middle ground, where an opponent has a feeling to it and acts in a way that players find exciting, is very taxing indeed. Difficulty is much the same way. It's very easy to make a game stupid easy and it's very easy to make a game stupidly difficult. They Bleed falls more towards the latter and I have difficulty believing it's anything beyond innate laziness. I realize if I sat the developer down and spoke with him I doubt he'd say that, but does anyone ever admit it?

There's parts and elements of the game that just feel unnecessary or fundamentally wonky. Combat in general can feel like a mixed bag with mostly a dull side to it. You kill enemies to gain access to check points, which allow you to restart at later parts of the level. This is a great system and a good solid reward, but combat ranges between tedious and just stupid. Enemies just have too much health and getting the combat system to do what you want in the spot you want it to requires too much finesse. This isn't a fighting game, it's primarily a platformer, so shifting gears in your mind between skittering off walls and air dashing away from spikes to the one-button with five different moves combat system is a bit of a lurch every time. In some spots you're supposed to boot and juggle, others you're supposed to stand and fight or dash and it ends up feeling essentially like a chore. Enemies just last too long. There's a reason most of the enemies in Super Mario brothers are one-shot to kill - They're not the reason you're there.

Enemy design is, outside of their visuals, pretty bad. The main foes take too long to kill and the others are mostly just irritating. I think the Knife Imps - Which are really difficult but quickly defeated - are what the game should feature. A quick burst of fear to get the adrenaline pumping. It's got lots of tedious platforming, I don't need more tedious enemies that take forever to kill. I have zero idea why the Shamblers were given a block ability. It adds nothing to the game beyond making it even more irritating to kill a basic level enemy. You also can't move through Shamblers most of the time, but you can dash through them, so you end up dashing into spikes that are positioned where they are for no reason beyond killing you when the game's over ambitious controls fight with you. I feel like I'm blaming the game a little for what could be my old Xbox 360 controller's issues, but there's just no reason for it to use so few buttons. Dash is very very close to strike in the control scheme, and if you're going to lazily fill the level with damage sources, you should seriously rethink Dash going off at a moment's notice.

The platforming feels a great deal like SMB did, but it doesn't spend much time at all getting you accustomed to it. I think about 5 minutes in you're expected to pull off insane jumps that involve skittering off walls with floors of spikes below you. It's pretty cool to watch yourself do it, but I feel like lots of people are just going to go 'ugh' and not want to fight with it. Pulling off a string of maneuvers, even if it isn't all that intellectually satisfying, does look really cool. On the other hand, level design is just ... Unnecessary in parts. There's spikes and bigger spikes all over the place, often in points that don't really have anything to do with the combat or the platforming. If I'm trying to do a tricky set of jumps, it's just a dumb waste of time to put wall spikes that wear me down but don't kill me. Seriously - Just kill me every time or stop fucking wasting my time.

Like I've said before, difficulty all the time isn't tension. It wears quickly into tedium and tedium isn't fun. Do you enjoy scrubbing the nasty mildew in your bathroom or something? Sure, there's a feasible counter-point lying in "That's a challenge" but the truth of the matter is simple - A challenge is fun when it's dynamic and grabs you. When it's just constant difficult tasks, it's tension, and tension isn't all that enjoyable.

You end up feeling like level design just had stuff thrown in or is being used to artificially pad out the length of the game. I'm not sure that's the intention, but it feels like that. You just die at random stupid times when trying to attend to other things. Combat is supposed to use the terrain, but often it is difficult - or the enemies are basically immune to stuff around you. Wraiths are a big one on this one, they take way too long to kill and they're immune to everything around you, so you're supposed to I think try to fight them somewhere that suits them. Which often means more back-tracking and god, like seriously? Can you pad out playtime anymore? What is this, Rage? The dumbest flaw in this game is the lack of a snapback button. If you take two hits and you're in the middle of a difficult section, there's zero point in continuing to play. A suicide button would suit the game's flow, but it makes you waste time instead. Then it leaves corpses hanging around the level to irritate you.

You can't really tell me the developer playtested this game and never thought to himself 'well, some of these platforming sections have obnoxious spikes that wear you down for no real reason and once you're low on health it's pointless to proceed' - That's a joke. It's pretty obvious a suicide button should be in, but I guess that would what, save you a couple wasted, dumb seconds? I mean hey, is this game supposed to be a fun challenge or a tedious waste of time? The difference is seconds. The result is a considerably much worse game.

Seriously, there are way too many points in this game where you'll either need to be really experienced, or you'll be trying to get through a level the first time and just want to snapback to the checkpoint. I don't see any reason for this button to be missing, but yeah, just waste more and more of my time.

What's positive? Well, as I've hinted, the visuals, sound design and the music are all really charming. The game's presentation feels cohesive and attractive. The controls are mostly really good - there's a couple little oddities like where I wonder why dash (which is forward+attack, which is the game as cut attack, which is forward+attack) wasn't given its own button. But otherwise you can pull off the full range of acrobatics pretty smoothly, and it looks great in action. This clashes with the unpolished game feel at points.

Like I said, I think They Bleed Pixels is pretty solidly a pass unless you feel like playing a really difficult and frankly at points outright tedious platformer. The game is hard, but stuff like shamblers blocking in combat or wraiths just sitting there in a point you can't jump to wastes your time and feels way too chore like. It's a pity, because the checkpoint system is really sweet and I really like the game's art assets. It kinda reminds me of Bastion, with its willingness to waste my time or smear crap on the screen, but leveled up a couple more tiers.

I mean, if the designer wanted to make a stupidly hard platformer and actually went through playtesting to tune the difficulty up, that's cool. But it's not a very compelling product to discuss with other people, and at points it feels less finely tuned, more just kinda tedious and lazy.

I think if I didn't have anything else to play I'd keep going in They Bleed. It's really not terrible, but the tedium wears down the awesomeness of the game. I stopped feeling satisfied and accomplished, instead feeling like I'm kind of an idiot for playing this at all. If there's a They Bleed Pixel 2, I'll probably buy that anyway, though hopefully there won't be a faux Cthulhu lovecraft thing thrown in. Like honestly, I know it's literary sperging, but Cyclopean was used to describe a type of architecture and it wasn't meant to imply it was made by cyclops. I dunno when a glowing book, some mind flayer looking dudes and "cyclopean" were thrown together to make up this "motif" but can we just put the idea back where we found it?

Also lastly the game is another title to crop up with "First Time Set up" rerun bugs. Not sure what the deal with this is, feels like Steam is getting sloppier as it goes. I'm not blaming the game at all here, the package is supposed to be handled by Valve.