Pixel Hero Prologue Preview - Parody Gear Solid: VR Missions

Pixel Hero Prologue throws players into the role of Golden Cobra, a member of the covert unit JACKAL. His goal: to take down the nine ex-JACKAL unit members who plan to hijack nuclear devices and take over the world. This world doesn't seem like a safe one to attack, though, as it's inhabited by the protagnists of dozens of different game franchises. Drawing from Halo, Silent Hill, Wolfenstein, Dark Souls, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto, and dozens more, Pixel Hero Prologue is filled with heroes just waiting for a reason to save the day. The demo, VR Missions (which you can grab from the game's Kickstarter site), gives a taste of what's to come, showing a decent RPG crammed with game references.

Golden Cobra needs some training before he's to take on leadership of his unit, even though he probably should already be highly-trained if he's being considered for such an important role. Then again, how many times have you jumped into the role of a veteran hero only to be given a quick rundown on how to shoot, run, or climb a ladder. The game starts right in with jokes and snide remarks about this, breaking the fourth wall as it makes fun of all the silly little instances in games like this. This sense of humor extends throughout most of the game's dialogue, constantly making jokes about player behavior and the kinds of acts we put our poor avatars through as we play. Golden Cobra isn't going to reach into a toilet to grab a key no matter how many times we tell him to. James Sunderland wouldn't have put up this much of a fight, though. It's cute, and made me chuckle a couple of times.

When it's joking around, it's pretty light and funny, but the more serious chunks of writing are a bit tangled at the moment. The game draws heavy inspiration from Metal Gear, and as such its story is complex, involving several different people and groups, asking you to keep track of the interrelations between them. This complicated, serious plot creates this weird disjoint with the light jokes about video games, where the game's tone can't seem to settle on what it wants to be. Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden had a similarly serious story to go along with its wackiness, but all of its silliness came from telling an absurd story as if it were a gripping drama. When you have to get Wilford Brimley to cure a character of Diabeetus in Gaiden, no one is laughing except the player. There is a division in Pixel Hero Prologue between when it is being serious and when it is goofing around that doesn't exist in Gaiden, and it makes the non-joking parts of Prologue a bit of a slog.

There's a lot of dialogue to sift through if you're going to understand what's going on in this game, and it throws a lot of characters and events at you quickly. It was unexpected given how silly the game's other dialogue and its marketing made it out to be, and I don't think I was ready to have to pay this close attention to it to understand it. It didn't help that, for as complicated as it was, it seemed like an uninteresting version of the Metal Gear storyline, and hindered the funnier sections that carried the game along much better.

I had a lot more fun out in the field, enjoying the turn-based combat and exploration. The dungeons drew from several different games, drifting from many of the previously-mentioned games in a pixel art style. Project Y Games did a really good job capturing the spirit of these places, designing castles, spooky hallways, and neon-stained streets that felt like the locations they were aping. It's some impressive stuff that had me excited to try out the other areas they're planning for the full game.

The characters also capture the style of the heroes and villains they're mimicking, too. I'm not a big fan of the big, blocky heads, but they're expressive and fun, looking like kid playset versions of the characters. I could mostly tell who each of them were, but characters without some large, obvious defining feature were much more difficult to figure out. The game kind of expects you to know who these people are at a glance, too, occasionally offering some dialogue hint on who they were, but there were a few I just flat out couldn't figure out. Their appearance adds to the game's silly atmosphere, but I still had some trouble telling folks apart at times, making it hard to know what the reference or joke was. It's not a frequent problem, but when it showed up, I was kinda clueless as to what I ws supposed to be laughing about.

Combat isn't bad, involving some pretty standard turn-based attacks. It does have two tiers of combat abilities that draw on either strength or dexterity, but that system wasn't quite in place at the moment. Using one or the other is supposed to be better against certain enemies, but I found the miss rate so high that I couldn't tell the difference. Damage was also all over the place, and the leveling system also hadn't been implemented yet. It made fights confusing and messy, with enemies shifting between hitting for a small chunk of damage to hitting me for over half of my health for no reason I could figure out. I'm assuming most of this will be ironed out later, but for now, the only way I could get through combat was by buying combat items that stuck to strict damage amounts.

Different party members make life easier and add their own abilities. The main hero had an attack that would let him put enemies to sleep (super helpful). Others cast different spells to heal or damage enemies, most of it being pretty standard for the genre. These were also a lot more consistent than the regular attacks, and I came to use them much more. The game sounds like it will have a more complex combat system in place for its later release, but the demo's combat is still a little too unpredictable for my liking.

Outside of combat, there are some good secrets to find. The game hides a lot of nice goodies, some much nicer than new guns or armor. I found an entire level outside of the main game that drew upon another famous franchise. Without spoiling it, the devs did a great job of capturing a complex game and boiling it down to a few simple, pixelated places, managing to balance their own sense of humor with the tone of the game they'd mimicked. It was an awesome secret to find, and was surprisingly good at capturing a spooky atmosphere. That this was a neat secret to find added some real incentive to keep exploring. I love games with extensive secrets, and this one was pretty great.

Pixel Hero Prologue has some issues, but it seems to be coming along well. The combat needs to be ironed out and the serious story doesn't always jive with the game's goofier elements, but it seems like the developers have a good handle on what they want the game to become. With some Kickstarter dollars and some tinkering, the game seems like it would be a fun, light, and silly RPG for anyone who's ever fallen in love with a game franchise. There's a lot of game-loving humor in here, and I hope Project Y Games can make those jokes really shine with the full release.

For more information on Pixel Hero Prologue: Tactical Espionage Pixels and Project Y Games, you can head to the developer's site or follow them on YouTube, IndieDB, and Twitter.

Source: IndieGames.com