McPixel 3 is the sequel to a puzzle game I really enjoyed back in the day; McPixel 1. Filled with humor and surprising nonsense, you had to solve a bunch of levels where there was some danger or situation that needed to be defused, oftentimes in strange ways. There was a great element of replaying levels in order to find all the gags hidden away. The sequel fares really well, but adds a few systems that I didn’t particularly enjoy and fumbles on a few minor things, which luckily doesn’t make a big hit on my overall appreciation. I did everything there was to do in McPixel 3 and I strongly recommend it!
The flow of the game is fairly simple; Each level is made out of multiple puzzles where something bad is usually happening. and you need to stop it. You do so by clicking on things with the mouse and see what happens. If you clicked on the wrong thing, or when a timer runs out, you usually lose the puzzle and move on to the next one. This goes on until you’ve completed all the puzzles in the level. The puzzles themselves are usually pretty great, and I won’t list here everything the game takes inspiration from (because discovering everything is part of the fun), but there is a lot of great stuff here. From time to time the game will also throw some kind of minigame at you, and they usually work, even if the controls can also be finnicky.
One thing I didn’t particularly enjoy is the walking around between levels. Where the first game was mostly a single screen that you picked levels from, this new one takes place in a city that you must walk around and explore to find levels. There isn’t that much to find and it’s more of a chore than anything else. I would’ve been happy with just a big old menu, but I understand that this new format made sense on a narrative side and it gave the world a bit more flavor.
The other thing I didn’t enjoy is how the ability to skip certain parts of levels that you have already seen is pretty hit or miss. Some puzzles will go really fast and you can try a bunch of different things quite quickly, others will take a long time to get to the point where you can try something new, others will have semi-cutscenes that you can only half-skip. This peppers a few small frustrations here and there, but luckily, it was nothing dealbreaking.
If you enjoy silly puzzles, or love clicking on things to see what happens, give McPixel 3 a try!
