Adventures of Pip (PlayStation 4) Review

Many games have tried to reinvent platforming. Some have succeeded, many have failed. Adventures of Pip seems to aim for a different approach entirely: take the best aspects of platformers, such as reliance on timing, subtle combat, and mechanics like gliding and wall-jumping, and combine them into something that, from a gameplay standpoint, is perfectly solid, magnificently average, and doesn't do anything wrong, but also doesn't do anything particularly exciting. That in itself would make for an okay game, but the devs behind Pip have offset this with a strong charm and concept.

The world in Adventures of Pip is retro-inspired, like many modern platformers, but with a unique twist: pixels are wealth. The more pixels a character has, the greater their wealth, and the characters show it, with some being akin to Super Nintendo-like sprites and others looking like something the NES might put out on a bad day. Enter Pip, a lad who consists of only one pixel, throw in some magic to allow him to consist of more pixels, then put him on a quest that gives him different abilities depending on which form (high-pixel or low-pixel) he's in, and Tic Toc Games seems to have found the perfect formula for making this could've-been-average game into something much more.