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"Savin' the day, the McPixel way!"

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


McPixel contains examples of:

  • Biting-the-Hand Humor: The penultimate mission of the sequel is a heist, where the target is a mansion belonging to Devolver Digital themselves.
  • Butt-Monkey: There's a certain old man who appears at least once in every chapter that 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...)
  • 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 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, and sometimes 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.
  • Detonation Moon: One of the stages is on the moon.
  • Digging to China: A stage 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.
  • 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. As they argue, a bomb suddenly lands between them, and the two duck for cover as it explodes. Cue credits.
  • Gasshole: One of the extras for 100% Completion is a "Fart-Along" rhythm game.
  • Groin Attack: Whenever McPixel interacts with a person, his first action will be a kick to the groin.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 . 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.
  • 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 the sequel 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:
  • 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.
  • 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 claims that there was going to be a McPixel 2, but it was too ambitious to succeed.
  • 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 someone 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.

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