Video Game / McPixel

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McPixel is a 2012 video game developed and published by Sos Sosowski.

There's a bomb somewhere in the building/house/deserted island/whale/castle/school/outer space/(insert location here)! You've got twenty seconds to defuse it! What would you do?

Be a complete idiot, apparently.

In this cross between WarioWare and Leisure Suit Larry, follow the adventures of adventure man, jack-of-all-trades and general vandal McPixel as he finds himself in various cliffhanger situations, and has only 20 seconds to save the day with a mixture of cartoon logic and wanton destruction.

Available here👁 Image
and through Steam. A sequel, McPixel 3, published by Devolver Digital, was released in 2022.

McPixel contains examples of:

• 100% Completion: Clearing a scene only nets you a silver ranking. Getting a gold ranking requires you to do every single thing you can do within a scene.
• Affectionate Parody: MacGyver (1985)... on drugs.
• All There in the Manual: In the sequel, character names and motivations have to be gleaned from the outfit menu and How to Play section.
• Ambiguously Bi: It's unclear if McPixel has any interest in women, though his one Optional Sexual Encounter in the sequel confirms he's at least into guys.
• Appease the Volcano God: One level tasks the player with choosing a sacrifice to stop a volcano from erupting.
• Ass Shove: Almost once per stage, there'll be a gag (and sometimes even a solution) where McPixel attempts to save the day by shoving something up something else's ass, or something being shoved up his.
• Bait-and-Switch: The logic of this game's puzzles runs on subverting one's expectations of how an object will be used, and then subverting that prior logic when it's funny to do so.
• Big Game: Stage 3-B has McPixel competing in the local nonathlon, trying to win events through underhanded trickery while also defusing bombs along the way.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: The penultimate mission of the sequel is a heist, where the target is a mansion belonging to Devolver Digital themselves.
• Bomb Disposal: The premise of the game is essentially "bomb disposal on drugs", with every level in the original dealing with the title character defusing a bomb. While McPixel still does bombination in the sequel, more levels task him with getting out of the way of other dangers as well.
• Butt-Monkey: Uncle Frank, an old man who appears at least once in every chapter, gets abused in various upsetting ways, such as being thrown off a bridge, out an elevator, out of a train, or having McPixel climb inside of him to safely detonate the bomb.
• The Cameo: A "Space Butterfly" level that was added at the request of Jesse Cox. PewDiePie, the Bro, Stephano and a Barrel appear in the same DLC set.
  • The promotional video about the non-existent McPixel 2 contains cameos from several people who worked with Devolver Digital in the past (Daniel Mullins, Bennett Foddy, Goichi Suda...)
• The Caper: Stage 4-B declares itself as a heist... though it's almost immediately subverted as McPixel isn't one for planning and bungles his way through Devolver's offices just doing what he usually does.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Chapter 4, Round 1, Level 4. McPixel gets hammered off a drink that's 1% alcohol and Groin Attacks Guy Fawkes. Can't hold it literally, either.
• Cloud Cuckooland: McPixel himself is just the tip of the iceberg; don't expect anyone—or anything for that matter—in the game to act in any sort of logically predictable manner.
• Comedic Sociopathy: McPixel's task is to make sure the bomb doesn't blow up, no one said anything about making sure bystanders don't get hurt or used as battering rams. The sequel's ethics are even looser (as a day is counted as saved if McPixel survives, and that's all that matters) and bombs are allowed to go off as long as McPixel isn't in the blast radius.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Chapter 4's special stage is all the same room. Only the outcomes on each of the rooms is different.
• Demolitions Expert: McPixel is a professional "bombinator" (bomb exterminator) whose cartoonish antics manage to save the day from very loud and painful explosions. He's also quite skilled at making bombs, too.
• Detonation Moon: One of the stages is on the moon.
• Digging to China: A solution to one round in McPixel 3 ends with this, or well, rather, digging to Poland.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: The developer even handed out promo codes for the game on a torrent page on The Pirate Bay. This gave the game a lot of publicity, which TPB's organizers helped along by modifying their logo to resemble McPixel's. Article linkie.👁 Image
  
• Eat the Bomb: McPixel himself does this sometimes to deal with a bomb.
• The Ending Changes Everything: McPixel himself set up all the bombs so he could charge exorbitant prices to get rid of them. Played for Laughs.
• Engineered Heroics: One of the extras for 100% Completion is a scene in which McPixel sends out the bombs he defuses.
• Excuse Plot: There's bombs, McPixel is defusing them, how they got there is anyone's guess. McPixel certainly isn't telling the audience how he sets those up.
• Final-Exam Boss: Stage 4-B in the sequel throws almost every prior minigame at the player as McPixel performs a heist on Devolver's headquarters.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Stage 4-C has a hallway of rooms that hold props used in the various Steve rounds, foreshadowing Steve's connection to McPixel.
• Foreshadowing: The "How to Play" screen hints that Steve will play a bigger role than his status as a gag character, ultimately leading to his confrontation in 4-C.
  Steve is different than McPixel. But perhaps he wish he wasn't...
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Stage 4-B is the only episode to distinctly lack optional gags, with 100% Completion awarded on the completion of a round. It's also structured significantly more linearly as it details McPixel's heist on Devolver Digital.
• Gainax Ending: The sequel ends on a doozy. After disarming the final bombs and saving the city, McPixel accuses Steve of being the one who planted all the bombs throughout the game. Steve denies it, instead claiming that McPixel himself did it in order to look like a hero like in the last game, only for him to deny it. They then turn to look at the player, who then clicks to throw a bomb at them, and McPixel dives out of the way while Steve is caught in the blast. Cue credits.
• Gasshole: One of the extras for 100% Completion is a "Fart-Along" rhythm game, and one of the DLC levels in the sequel has a tower defense minigame about preventing McPixel from farting so badly that it kills his grandma.
• Groin Attack: Whenever McPixel interacts with a person, his first action will be a kick to the groin.
• Hacking Minigame: The final level tasks McPixel with solving eight hacking minigames where he has to connect two points using a shoot-em-up ship in order to defuse Steve's bombs.
• Hub Under Attack: The final round of McPixel 3 takes place in McBurg, with McPixel having to hack and defuse eight bombs that Steve (maybe) planted across town.
• Hub World: In 3 the hub (formally called McBurg in the "How to Play" menu) is a town that McPixel can wander around in and pay various vendors with coins to access new rounds.
• Idiot Hero: The titular protagonist, of course! And lucky for him it's one of the few universes where one has to be an idiot in order to win.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: One set of levels in the sequel subjects McPixel to a Shrink Ray and tasks him with solving problems involving being considerably smaller than usual.
• Iron Butt-Monkey: The protagonist himself is subjected to almost as many Amusing Injuries as he inflicts on others, but always survives his escapades to save another day.
• Jumping on a Grenade: And sometimes, eating the grenade. 50% of the time, it works. The other fifty percent, everything else explodes.
• Laugh Track: The sitcom-themed levels in the sequel provide one of these whenever McPixel does anything. There's also a button to permanently toggle this effect after completing the game.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: The only kind of logic that can beat 99% of the puzzles. To put things in perspective, the first rule of playing this game is this: If the solution you have in mind makes sense, there's a 75% chance it's wrong. The remaining 25%? It works, but not in the way you were expecting it to. After a couple levels, it's almost second nature. The four bonus rounds, meanwhile, are No Logic Puzzles.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: The final set of levels in the main game tasks McPixel with defusing the one bomb out of eleven that's not a dud. To make things worse, the six levels in the set are all identical apart from their outcomes.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The recurring "Bill" character is a gray-haired politician and businessman who McPixel has flirtatious interactions with, and serves as a pastiche of Bill Clinton.
• Not Me This Time: Despite being the one behind the bombs in the first game, McPixel apparently isn't the one responsible for them in 3, with it implied to be the player's doing.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: One of the gags in stage 2-A of the sequel implies McPixel loses his virginity with Bill, if the desk violently shaking is any indication. Unfortunately, the bomb in the basement is still a problem.
• Permanently Missable Content: The game has four Mind Screw bonus rounds (one made entirely out of the title character, one set on the rainbow trail of Nyan Cow, one set in a sewer underneath a toilet, and a crazily glitched up one) that can only be accessed a limited number of times while doing the initial runthroughs of each of the official stages ^note the Free DLC stages do not count. They are reached by getting three silver or gold completions in a row, and missing once breaks the chain. Once you finished all normal stages, these bonus rounds can no longer be reached without wiping the save file.
• Perspective Flip: One set of levels in the sequel involves playing previously existing levels, but where you control someone involved in the scenario other than McPixel.
• Potty Emergency: Sometimes the catalyst for McPixel's problems is his own poor bladder control.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: This was always present in the first game as McPixel was the one who set up the bombs, but this gets exaggerated in the sequel where there are plenty of rounds where "saving the day" is less about defusing a bomb and more about McPixel not getting hurt, with the game cheerily declaring the day is saved right after.
  The goal of the game is to save McPixel using any means.
  Nothing else matters, only McPixel must survive.
• Pun-Based Title: Every chapter and round in both games has some sort of pun relating to bombs or explosions as its title, save for the last two rounds of 3.
• Quote Mine: Take a look at the website and see how many review quotes are mined to the point of unintelligibility.
• Rebus Bubble: The scant amount of character dialogue in both games often takes the form of speech bubbles with images and = signs.
• Retraux:
  • Mimics late 70s/early 80s pixel games. The cover art itself is very eighties as well.
  • The lack of sound effects, along with the bizarre non-sequitur slapstick comedy, invoke the style of early 20th century silent films.
  • A set of levels in the sequel is based on emulating the graphics of various classic systems, including the Atari 2600, NES, Game Boy, CGA-era PC, and Windows.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Bonus Stages are specifically geared around a theme of Film, Video Games, and Cartoons.
    • The first Bonus stage features: Titanic (1997), Star Wars (specifically, Return of the Jedi), Alien (the third film, it seems), The Quick and the Dead, Terminator, and Harry Potter.
    • The second bonus stage has Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros. (and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for some reason), Final Fantasy VII, Portal, Pokémon, and Mortal Kombat.
    • The third bonus stage has The Simpsons, The Flintstones, The Smurfs, Dexter's Laboratory, Dragon Ball Z and The Lion King (1994).
  • One Bonus Round is Nyan Cat.
  • One of the taglines is "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
  • The Space Core is visible in most outer space stages.
  • Getting McPixel to drink coffee in the "Coffee Shop" round turns him into Cornholio.
  • One ending sequence shows the main character humping a PS3, which is a reference to this video👁 Image
    from Chris Chandler.
  • The first "space opera" round in stage 2-C in the sequel requires McPixel to suss out an Impostor among the crew by calling meetings and venting all the crew into space.
  • The sequel introduces the character Kazuya, who desire to be a yakuza and character design pay homage to the Like a Dragon series.
• Strong as They Need to Be: McPixel's exact strength runs on Rule of Funny. Some days he's able to knock out regular people with three or even one blow, while other times he struggles to lift very light objects and gets floored easily.
• Super Mode: The sequel has a few rounds where McPixel becomes "Super", marked with a special icon on the stamp tracker and accompanied by a scene where McPixel's eyes flash white and a "Super" button appears on-screen, turning him into a giant-sized Flying Brick. This happens three times in the game: when fighting the crime boss in 2-C, the giant monster in 4-A, and Mecha Fork Parker in 4-B.
• Take a Third Option: A recurring theme in the game's puzzles is to take a completely unexpected option, but a narrative one comes up in the sequel. At the end of 4-B, Fork Parker offers McPixel a million coins if he returns the diskette of McPixel 2. McPixel responds by kicking him, taking the million-coin bill... and then throwing the diskette down the cliff he kicked Fork down.
• Time Bomb: Almost every level has a bomb with a fuse or timer, but it's set for 20 seconds to respond. In the stage with a visible timer (Dual-phase bomb in chapter 4), it's malfunctioning and switching between 0 and 1 but this doesn't affect the timer.
• Timed Mission: Every level gives you twenty seconds to figure out a solution. The sequel has variable time limits to accommodate the various multi-screen stages.
• Title Scream: MCPIXEL!! greets you each time you fire the game up. The same graphic also appears whenever you start and finish a round, though the voice clip itself doesn't occur. Steve gets his own graphic in the sequel, but in his case the accompanying voice clip always plays.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: One of the main additions to the sequel are missions that suddenly shift the game's genre, including a side-scrolling shmup, a racing game, a beat-em-up, several sports, an auto-scrolling platformer and a first-person shooter among others.
• Unexpected Virgin: A volcano demands a Virgin Sacrifice. You have the option to toss a Dumb Blonde or a cow in. The solution to that particular puzzle is for McPixel to throw himself into the volcano.
• Un-Installment: McPixel 3 is the second game in the series. A gag promotional video by Devolver👁 Image
  claims that there was going to be a McPixel 2, but it was too ambitious to succeed. Level 4-B is all about McPixel's attempt to find the floppy disk containing McPixel 2.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: McPixel is a horny idiot whose most common interaction with other people is kicking them, urinates on anything and everything, and set up bombs so people would pay him to get rid of them, but his antics are hilarious.
• Urine Trouble: McPixel apparently has a thing for urinating on certain objects and people for whatever reason. Is almost certain to happen if he drinks alcohol of any sort.
• Wham Episode: The sequel's final level set starts with McPixel being thrown into a dungeon with a puzzle reminiscent of the tutorial level, interspersed with him doing other wacky shenanigans like running for office and holding a concert. While the shenanigan levels play like normal, the escape sequences follow an oddly structured sequence with continuity. Until the awards ceremony level, which plays out almost entirely like the events of one of the game's trailers, except the solution is to simply walk out, at which point McPixel removes his outfit to reveal himself to be Steve in disguise. It turns out he hired Kazuya to kidnap McPixel while he posed as him in the other levels.
• Who Wants to Be "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?": A mission in the sequel puts McPixel on a pastiche of the show and asks him an incredibly difficult algebra question. Many of the gags are obtained by using his lifeline to phone various friends.
• Wire Dilemma: McPixel encounters one of these in one scenario. His response is to just yank out a fistful of wires without any care for order or precision. Naturally, it works.
• Zero-Effort Boss: Despite being given a dramatic Battle in the Rain and a health bar, Steve folds after a single kick from McPixel.