 Steam Drunk. They believe pixels is a combination of an arcade-style platformer like Superhouse of Dead Ninjas and a one-on-one fighting game like Killer Instinct. At first glance, this looks like the usual side-scrolling stuff, with stylized retro pixel art, but the hook here is not just to complete the level and eliminate everyone in your way, but to do it in style. There's a seemingly endless amount of combinations, jumps, dashes, kicks, stabs, and all sorts of other ways you can mow through enemies. You can't just kill these guys, you gotta go ultra combo on their ass. There's even a long-ass tutorial before you start playing that spells out all the moves for you. That's all well and good, but it's more important that the game provides a suitable environment to do all this stuff with good level design, and let me expand on that a little bit. Kids that grew up in the 80s will remember these toy commercials, that featured toys that look way more interesting than they actually were because of the surrounding environments and all this extra crap. I remember my brother and I seeing these and saying, okay, the copter is cool, but what about all the extra shit that they're playing with? All we have to knock over are soup cans and crackers, that's lame. Sorry, got off on kind of a tangent there. The point is, yeah, it's fun to have cool abilities in gameplay, but you need to put just as much work into the level design, or it's going to fall flat. Thankfully, they bleed pixels has more substance to it than just soup cans and crackers. The level design is pretty good for the most part. You can cling to walls, slide around, and your jump rage is substantial, which is important because the levels are ginormous here. Although this level here, where nearly every surface is slippery, is ridiculous and not particularly fun, since all you're doing is just flailing about and hoping you happen to land in the right spot. But, there's lots of bonus levels here too that offer a little something extra here and there. This game does get really hard though, it's either three hearts in the upper right, that's all you get, good luck. The inventive function I like is the checkpoint system. For all the blood you collect and each enemy you dispatch, you fill the checkpoint gauge in the upper left that allows you to create your own checkpoints, and it also refills your health, so that's handy. The story has this girl arrive at the Lafcadio Academy for troubled young ladies. She finds a book covered in blood and promptly has nightmares where her arms turn into pincers, so if that's your fetish, you're in luck here. As the game progresses, the nightmares in reality become more and more indistinguishable, as this book continues to torment her for some reason. Hey, it enables you to kill stuff and throw blood-filled bags of black things onto a bunch of spikes, so whatever works, right? Anyway, it seems there's a lot of games that look and sound like they bleed pixels out there right now, and this game at least stands out a little bit thanks to its visual style, platforming, and its fighting system which combines killer instinct combos with Mortal Kombat gore. If you like what you see here, add it to your wish list and wait for a sale, when it usually goes for a couple bucks.