Pixel Devil and the Broken Cartridge

One of my favorite silly entertainment tropes is when an unsuspecting character gets sucked into a video game. It's often cheesy and maybe even a little embarrassing, but I love seeing how other creative people view the video game industry. Pixel Devil and the Broken Cartridge is a new Switch game that plays into this trope by sending a hardcore gamer on an authentic 8-bit adventure. That's a pretty great concept, right? Too bad the end result is a rather generic affair that brings nothing new or interesting to the tried and true 2D formula.

This is the story of a young couple who move to a new apartment and discover an old cartridge tucked away behind a cupboard. What the couple doesn't realize at the time is that this is no ordinary NES game, but rather a key that opens up a portal to a weird 8-bit world. Pixel Devil decides to jump into the broken cartridge after his girlfriend, Valya, is abducted. This sets us on an action-packed journey through five tough stages in an attempt to save the girl and get back to setting up the new apartment.

One thing is clear: First-time developer Level Evil grew up playing Capcom games like Mega Man, DuckTales and Ghosts 'n Goblins. We see this not only in the graphics and level designs, but also how we earn new abilities just from defeating the different bosses. And speaking of which, even those bosses look like they were pulled straight out of old Disney Afternoon games. That old cartridge may have had its label scratched off, but it seems clear that it was supposed to come from Capcom.

As a big fan of that era of Capcom, I see nothing wrong with any of this. And to be completely honest, I was fully on board with the idea of a Mega Man rip-off right from the jump. The problem with this game is that it doesn't have a whole lot of fresh ideas, so instead what it does is recycle every platforming cliché you can think of. The result is a perfectly serviceable 2D platformer that fails to carve out its own identity. If you can picture a paint-by-numbers side-scroller where you shoot at enemies and jump over spike pits, then you already know what to expect from Pixel Devil and the Broken Cartridge.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the gameplay. One of the issues you run into when mimicking old school games is that we all know how they're supposed to control. You can't just look the part, because so much of what made those old school games fun is the tight gameplay. That's not something we get in Pixel Devil. The controls are too loose and not as responsive as you would like. It felt like I was spending more time fighting the controller than shooting at enemies.

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Another problem is that Level Evil doesn't do enough with the five stages. The fun of the trapped-in-a-video-game trope is that you can poke fun at the clichés and expectations. But Pixel Devil doesn't do any of this. You could argue that the closing cinema does at least attempt to say something about 8-bit games, but the levels don't reflect that in any way. All we get are generic levels based in forests, cities, caves and space. We've seen this all before, and Pixel Devil has nothing new to say about it.

It doesn't help that it often feels like Level Evil learned all the wrong lessons from playing Mega Man. A good example of this is the level select, which in theory should allow you to play the game in any order. The problem is that you can't really play the game in any order, because there's a very specific path you need to take. The levels will incorporate obstacles that require an earned ability, such as using a pogo stick to get over tough terrain or a gun that shoots darts you can use like stairs. Without these skills, you have to exit the level and battle the right boss, which is not how Mega Man worked.

And speaking of bosses, I found these one-on-one fights to be lacking. Not only are the battles not especially interesting, but the villains themselves are pretty lame. To be fair to the developer, they do attempt to explain this at the end, but without spoiling anything, all this did was make me wish they would have found more interesting bad guys. And it goes beyond them being boring, because they aren't much fun to fight. There are a couple bosses you can take down by just mashing the shoot button, which doesn't take a whole lot of skill.

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And did I mention that there's an insane difficulty spike right at the very end? The first four stages are challenging, but nothing you can't conquer after a few tries. But then there's final stage, which not only wants you to fight all the old bosses again, but do so without any continues or checkpoints. I have a hunch the difficulty spike is going to take a lot of people off guard, assuming they stick with the game long enough to make it to that final battle.

Pixel Devil and the Broken Cartridge looks and sounds the part, but comes up short in almost every other way. This 8-bit adventure features generic levels, an eye-rolling story, boring bosses and imprecise platforming controls. And if all that wasn't bad enough, its biggest sin is not having anything original to say. It's like a Capcom greatest hits package, only without the good gameplay and charming characters. This is a game built on squandered potential.