Let me say up front that I’m not a big fan of old-school arcade games, because I suck at them. My brain just can’t tell my fingers fast enough where my little on-screen avatar needs to be so as to avoid all of the flying bullets and debris that inevitably ends my life. So I play, I die, I get frustrated and I stop playing.

That said, even though Pixel Boy and the Ever Expanding Dungeon (hereafter just plain old Pixel Boy) has arcade elements to it, I found that even though I died a lot, I wanted more. I wanted to do just one more level, take out just another few enemies to get a few more coins to upgrade or repair my armour or buy a new powerup to make Pixel Boy just that much better. Because Pixel Boy is what every good arcade game needs to be: clever and tough with a good balance between challenge and reward.

First things second

But I digress. Pixel Boy is a top-down shooter that brings in elements from old-school arcade games and action RPGs. Your challenge is to navigate a series of randomised dungeons, collecting three key fragments that unlock the next level while dodging and shooting enemies, and every four levels there’s a unique “boss” that must be taken down.

Boss fights are tough, but fair, and while it takes a bit of effort to learn their patterns in order to out-manoeuvre them, doing so successfully is incredibly satisfying.

Dungeons are populated with a wide variety of enemies that must be killed by Pixel Boy’s attack. Some of them come after him while others move around in random (and not-so-random) patterns, firing their attacks off and giving him something to dodge. Sometimes, there are a lot of them and moving and shooting without getting hit becomes quite the challenge. Fortunately Pixel Boy has a regenerating shield that can be deployed which helps keep him alive in a pinch.

Killing enemies earns experience, which levels Pixel Boy up and lets him upgrade five statistics that make him faster, shoot further, more deadly, healthier and boost his rate of fire. I’d highly recommend boosting damage early on as it’s easier to dodge some enemies than it is to kill them when you’re a bit underpowered.

On yer toes, soldier!

The game keeps you on your toes like an old fashioned shoot-em-up, but it also has a bit of a story: enemies drop coins and powerups and there’s a crafting sub-game that lets you combine the powerups you collect to give Pixel Boy’s “gun” all kinds of abilities, such as extra damage to spread shots to bullets getting bigger as they travel across the level. It’s an action-action RPG, if you will. Action+ squared.

As well as tooling up your gun, you can also make armour. Enemies drop “Armour Orbs” with properties that change according to how you combine them. There really is a lot of underlying detail here, making Pixel Boy more than the simple arcade shooter it appears to be at first glance.

And the soundtrack is really good, too. French artist Pyramid has composed an homage to arcade soundtracks of old, with his own modern twist that keeps tracks sounding fresh and a perfect accompaniment to the frantic arcade action happening on-screen. It’s worth the price of the game on its own, and if you want to own it so you can listen to it while you work, for example, you can get it from Pyramid’s website when it becomes available.

If you build it they will come

But for all the blasting and smashing and boss fights, it’s Pixel Boy’s crafting system that makes it utterly compelling. The game’s powerups can be combined in over 6 000 different ways to produce a wide range of weapon and armour effects, and it’s these effects that will have you plundering level after level looking for another one to add to the mix, or farming coins so that you can afford them.

With the right combination of powerups, Pixel Boy is nigh-unstoppable, and I must admit to feeling pure gleeful delight while his powerups last. Each powerup has a limited number of uses, though, so when “ammo” runs dry it becomes really tough to take out enemies with your default attack. It’s therefore in your best , interests to always have a few in your inventory as backup, just in case.

First time folly

For my first game, I didn’t notice the ammo count on my powerups and when I ran out, I was deep in a dungeon, coin-less and left with only my default attack. I had also levelled up my health and not my damage, so taking enemies out was frustratingly slow, and so I died. A lot.

When you die in Pixel Boy, you drop the powerups you’ve collected since your last visit to town. Fortunately you keep all of your XP, coins and Armour Orbs, but because you don’t have any powerups and have to buy new ones with coins you don’t necessarily have, it can be quite a challenge to work your way back up to where you were before you died.

Going back into the dungeon and dying over and over again due to my bad choices got old, fast, and eventually I restarted the game, this time armed with a better strategy that favoured boosting my damage stat over health every time I levelled up. I liked that there were consequences to my actions that forced me to re-think my approach.

Charmed to meet you

I have no affinity for retro-shooters and I can take or leave R-Type at will. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Pixel Boy. I really liked what the developers did with the concept, and the way they presented the game in a charming, stylised blocky fashion really grew on me the more I played.

The challenge is high, of course, but that too formed part of the appeal – I never felt like my hand was held, and I enjoyed the way the developers pretty much said “Hey we know this isn’t easy but we believe you can do it!” by giving me all the tools needed to succeed, and then letting me figure out how best to go about it on my own.

Work in progress

There are a handful of planned features that haven’t been implemented yet: a daily dungeon is apparently coming according to the main menu, as is full controller support by way of a future update, but otherwise Pixel Boy is good to go. A patch has been released since it came out last Friday that has addressed a handful of minor bugs, so the developers are still very much committed to the game.

It’s also not expensive – you can grab Pixel Boy for just $8.49 on Steam and the Humble Store until the 6th of June, after which it goes up to $9.99.

Should you play Pixel Boy? Even if your youth was spent training your fingers by dodging bullets and frantically firing weapons at foes in games like Xenon II, Galaga, Metroid and others, you’ll love what Pixel Boy has to offer. It’s tough but fun, with enough nods to modern game design to keep it feeling retro, but fresh.

(And if you’re really interested, we still have some Steam keys to give away over here.)