The Delicious Deadly Delight of They Bleed Pixels.

They Bleed Pixels is a dangerous and exciting game. The music drips with threat as you load up for the first time and see, in lo-fi graphics, the arrival of a strange emily to an austere school for girls. She discovers an evil book and having read it, is plagued by evil dreams with literary epigraphs.

The epigraphs reference not only H.P. Lovecraft's works from which the Victorian horror theme is drawn, but takes snippets from writers such as, Edgar Allen Poe, China Mievelle, and Phillip Pullman. These provide exposition for each coming level. These screens provide players with a literary bookshelf, which can extend and enrich the experience provided they are willing to look beyond their computer screens. Furthermore by having a different author, and with it a different platforming setting, whether it is underwater, in hell or Japanese lanterns, makes each new level seem like a new book. Entering these levels turns a new leaf, a new experience, and thus we mimic the curiosity of the protagonist when she opened the dark and terrible book that is now sending her visions.

In the dreams the young girl is transformed. Her arms become sharp tuning-fork shaped claws, and the game forces her to use them to inflict damage on the shadowy monsters that threaten to kill her. Initially the transformation is shown as a liberating and dangerous experience. She levitates, her arms grow and change into razor sharp weapons and simultaneously a smile grows sadistically across her face.

Then the gameplay kicks in and this sadism, delight and liberation is tainted by the reality that she has been thrown into a brutal horror setting. Littered with saw-blades, deadly and fast enemies each stunning landscape seeks to mutilate and murder her. As players, whatever pretensions of success we might have are reined in by a simple combat and platforming style that expects perfection and punishes the slightest mistake. A bit like going to boarding school then?

The gameplay mimics the polish and precision of Super Meat Boy, an insanely tricky game which encourages premature death but counteracts it with quick reloads, and fast pacing. Both games encourages not the sadism of the player, but their masochism as they repeatedly throw themselves against spikes saw-blades and enemies. Thus They Bleed Pixels alters the central dynamic of the game; the protagonist's transformation which the player initially viewed as liberating, mutilates the young girl's body and sets her up for a series of violent deaths.

When she awakes from each excruciating dream, in which she will have died over and over, she tries to elaborately rid herself of the book, burying it, throwing it in a river and burning it. But it returns again to haunt her revealing that the escapism is the means of controlling her.

A friend recently told me that to play games such as these was an exercise in futility. Unless I improve my platforming to a level where I might be able to complete the game I will never have the satisfaction that is provided by a myriad of other more mainstream titles. Each year, a new Call of Duty title reproduces a  fantasy of masculinity, which delivers the player the sense of completion and coherence that connects the physical prowess of the male body to the desire of the player to dominate. But in They Bleed Pixels: a game that foregrounds the inevitability of the characters repeated death no sense of coherence is possible.

Yet the player returns again and again to masochistically inch their way through the levels because they want to find the ending. In order to do they must do almost exactly what the game wants; hitting each button in a perfect sequence. At the end of each level, any feeling of empowerment is tainted by the reality that they survived because they did what the game told them to do. The liberation of this victorian, female character is tainted by the reality that her every action is controlled by the menacing terror of the dream-scapes. Her search for identity is futile; as the road to it is coated and slick with her blood.

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A short post script.

This game is ridiculously fun! The bonus levels are fabulous, including a child-drawn level called "They Bleed Ponycorns" which is adorable, and the new "All Hallows Eve" level which was a free add-on for all customers, new and old and really really brilliantly done! A* Business Practice.

Rank D? Just ONE MORE GAME.