What if MacGyver was really bad at his job? You’d have MacGruber, the incompetent parody played by Will Forte of the resourceful hero who uses what’s around him to save the day. But What if MacGyver was really, really bad at his job? Then you’d have McPixel, the hero, or anti-hero, of McPixel 3. At PAX East, I went hands on with the wacky game and learned more about this chaotic and sometimes resourceful character from developer Sos Sosowski.
Published by Devolver Digital, McPixel 3 is the sequel to McPixel, the 2012 point-and-click puzzle game in which McPixel finds himself in various scenarios where he has save the day in 20 seconds. This frequently involves him kicking things. If McPixel 3 is the sequel to that title ten years later, what happened to McPixel 2? “We don’t talk about that,” Sos tells me. This kind of flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature is par for the course.
Starting up the game, I initially found myself faced with total bewilderment. The PAX build has a few more levels than the current iteration, and it’s a bit harder in difficulty. I failed over and over with wild results. The game description promised me I’d meet “Steve” a recurring character who is announced by his own title card in McPixel 3. Who is Steve? “He’s just a dude. He likes to go fishing,” Sos tells me. And this is true. Fishing by using corn as bait, Steve catches McPixel eating popcorn. Fishing using a worm? Steve fishes up a bazooka which fires right in his face. Things do not go as expected in McPixel 3, but they always have interesting results.
In each session, I’d either succeed or fail, but either way the game would cycle on to the next session. At the end of the round, I would then replay any sections that I had failed. Reaching the “boss,” a multistage and hilarious encounter onboard a plane with no pilot, I finished it to end up at a suburban house complete with a sitcom-style laugh track for any actions I undertook. Sos informed me that this was a favorite of his. I had to remove a bomb from the living room, and the solution, not to spoil it too much, involved getting myself removed from the house instead. “Saving the day” often involves thinking outside the box, saving McPixel rather than anyone around him, and if others make it out alive too, well that’s swell.
“It’s rapid fire, but it’s still a puzzle [where] you’ve got to find the solution,” Sos explained to me, describing the time limit games matched with creative and zany problem-solving. For example, sports matches in the game often involve breaking the rules in order to win. And kicking. As a fan of cycling, Sos added a few cycling levels, but there’s a ton of variety. After all, while I only played around 17 puzzles during my PAX session, the full game will have 100 when it arrives later this year for PC and other systems as well.
Finishing up my play through with my mind calibrated to the chaotic logic around McPixel 3, the next player jumped in and promptly got hit by a bus. Asking for clarification around what that meant, Sos just smiled at them and said, “There is nothing I can say that will make you understand what is happening.” A parody of a parody of a high-octane show, McPixel 3 is the epitome of chaotic absurdity.
