Take the lovable arcade games Pac-Man and Snake, and then add in a cat and ducklings: the result of your experiment is Pix the Cat! The developers from Pastagames brings Steam and PSN users a trip to the past with this indie title. Pix must hatch numerous eggs and set the ducklings free by leading them to target circles only to be sent off to another level to repeat the process. It sounds like a simple concept but what happens when you play the game is something entirely different.
The more you progress in Pix the Cat the more challenging the levels become. The factors that work against you are time, walls and obstacles. You have a small amount of time to complete multiple levels while going for the maximum amount of points. Hitting a wall or an obstacle with your line of little ducklings behind you will result in a catastrophic loss of both points and baby ducks.
Trying to hatch every egg and lead all the ducklings in a single file to their home circles is a trying task when using your computer’s arrow keys. You want to make sure to hatch ALL the eggs before sending the ducks home to earn the most points for that particular level. Pix moves extremely slow in the first couple of levels but once you move onto the third and forth ones, it becomes almost impossible to move Pix gracefully without hitting the wall at least once. You will soon find that your key strokes are not fast enough to keep up with Pix. Plus Pix’s speed increases even more when you create combos.
Pix the Cat falls under the arcade genre and it’s nostalgic all right. The childhood memories of standing in an arcade playing games until I ran out of quarters flooded back to me as I tried to rescue this motherless ducks. Every inch of this top-down maze game overflows with mechanics from old-school games. Even the blue bubbles from Legend of Zelda have even wiggled their way into this game. Eventually you will find those floating skulls that are more than happy to stop Pix from sending the ducklings home.
The set-up of creating the longest train without boxing yourself in is not new, but the four game modes is what makes this game fresh. Each mode after the arcade mode needs to be unlocked by reaching a certain score. The Nostalgia Mode is the best one because the game gets a 1930’s black and white Oswald makeover. (Oswald is the first cartoon character Walt Disney create cartoon shorts for and is Mickey Mouse’s predecessor.) As colorful as the other levels are, the nostalgia mode is a nice variety and change of pallete when playing Pix for an hour in one sitting.
The major flaw with this Pac-Man/ Snake mash-up is most of the soundtrack. Quite frankly the music is absolutely annoying and distracting. Thankfully the developers added a feature to change the volume of the music and sound affects. The sound affects are bountiful enough to compensate for the music being turned off and you can concentrate on reaching your score goal in peace. The only mode that offers an enjoyable music experience is the nostalgia mode.
The cartoon style of the nostalgia mode really makes Pix the Cat worth plaything through till the end and even makes up for the early mode’s distracting music. Even though it is frustrating to get through the early modes to unlock it, the black and white animation makes all the effort worth while. Pix the Cat does offers enough content to justify the $9.99 price tag on Steam. The cuteness of sending the duckies home will bring you back to this game again and again!