PixYPHUS is a game that leaves one perplexed. This simple “game” aims to be part Greek myth, part Zen-master meditation technique and part psychological exercise. PixYPHUS is based on the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, who Zeus condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, as a hellish punishment for tricking the feisty gods.
Get PixYPHUS in the App Store
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The Game
PixYPHUS is meant to enthrall casual gamers with an innovative experience that brings you on a journey where watching the changing landscape and skylines becomes a kind of soul searching experience, as a lonely pixel pushes a grubby boulder up the infinite slope of a cartoon mountain.
The Gameplay
The game, if you can call it one, could not be any easier. Just press the screen and hold your finger down on your device’s touchscreen surface in order to cause a giant stone hand to release a boulder so that it can be pushed. Once you let go of the touchscreen, you LOSE and must begin the thankless chore of pushing a boulder up an endless mountain once more! A word to the wise (and those in favor of keeping their sanity): Don’t do that.
Art and Graphics
The graphics in PixYPHUS are imbued with one riveting purpose: minimalism. The cartoon landscape and skylines feature shooting stars and fireflies clambering past trees and other rocks that cross the field of vision. Overall though, if the game had Google Earth-like landscapes that invoked beauty as you sit staring at the screen, then it might be fairly enjoyable in its visuals. As it is now, a two-dimensional block pushes a makeshift boulder up a mountain until the end of time (or until your frustration and/or lack of Buddhist Zen meditation skill allows for you to release your thumb), and the unvarying cartoonish slope ambles on and on and on. The daytime does change to night, and vice versa, invoking happy graphical reminisces back to my Nintendo Entertainment System’s days.
Music and Sound
There are occasional strums to an ancient sounding guitar-like instrument. That’s it…until you fail. Then there is a CLANG. Woopie!
Conclusion
In PixYPHUS, there are no points to be had. There are no thrilling, realistic, or thought provoking visuals. There is no beginning, no ending and no interesting death or splat as you lose. There is only a cartoon boulder, geometric avatar (not unlike the square dot in Atari’s Adventure game) and an exercise in patience that could give one carpel tunnel syndrome. Not sure where the innovative “game” is here, but one thing is for certain, there is no “fun” to be had here.
However, considering the April 1st release date of this app, perhaps it is all just a divine prank…
Get PixYPHUS in the App Store
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Back in my time before Atari we were so poor all we had to play with were rocks. This game takes me back to childhood goodness! Then when we were done rolling our rocks, we would throw them thru windows.
Marcula
I wish there were windows to throw rocks at in this game. It would be more fun..
I’ll take Atari Paperboy any day over this haha
First and foremost I would like to thank you from the deepest part of my being for sharing your thoughts on PixYPHUS here. The usual comments about rather being water-boarded than playing this game have been entertaining, but not informative. This is the exact thing I was hoping for when I started to work on PixYPHUS.
I had initially planned on not making formal statements about where my mind was when creating PixYPHUS, but seeing as this is the only serious review so far about my creation I think it may be interesting to share. Mind you, even though I had many concepts of my own, it wasn’t my goal to have them all apparent to everyone. I loved reading what you perceived my intentions with PixYPHUS were.
There is a time and a scenario that I see as a perfect one for someone to come across PixYPHUS. It’s late at night, and you’re in bed. You can’t sleep. You check out the app store for something that may be interesting and you happen to come across PixYPHUS. It’s free, so why not give it a try. Your room is dark and you’re on your side, holding your iPhone with one hand and staring at the screen. At first you try to make sense of what the purpose is here, but that soon gets lost to other things. Then you either keep playing, or stop.
Perfect.
My concepts: Touch. The idea that humans are naturally star gazers and look to the heavens for inspiration while mobile technology keeps our heads pointed down towards earth. Time. What is a game? Introversion and self control.
Touch: Mobile games, specifically touch based mobile games, work hard to hide the touch. This may seem strange, but when playing Angry Birds (as a quick and wonderful example), it’s not the screen that you’re touching, it’s a slingshot that your pulling back and aiming. If you thought to yourself, “I’m touch the screen and sliding my finger and then not touching the screen anymore, the magic is lost. At first, the touch in PixYPHUS relates to effort and reward. Reward being that Pixyphus moves the boulder up the mountain and you get to see some new environments. After a while though, the touch shifts away from the game and towards the actual action of touching. The flatness of the screen becomes very apparent, and the effort being put forth loses the reward factor because it’s no longer associated with Pixyphus moving the boulder. It’s about you putting effort into making a game run. Now you get to a point where you have to decide if the game is worth the effort. For some, the monotonous graphics with slight variations give an immediate answer saying, no, it’s not a good game and I want to stop right now. So they will. They’ll delete it from their phone and they’ll think to themselves, “Wow, what a crappy game.” Others will have an inner desire to push onward and upward, unsure if there will even be a reward for their efforts.
We are star gazers: I have become somewhat bothered by this change in our behavior. I’ve noticed it in myself and I see it all around me. We look down and into our phones, waiting for social media updates or text messages rather than looking up and out at the infinite possibilities of the truly unknown. PixYPHUS isn’t meant to be strict commentary on this, and I don’t see it as an evil, but it did have weight when I was designing the game.
Time: This plays into the touch concept a bit. I made the movement of Pixyphus slow because it comes off as labored, and this rushes the touch concept into the player’s mind much faster. Your time suddenly becomes apparent, and it becomes a factor in whether you want to continue playing or not. After all, your time is valuable since you only have a finite amount of it. Developers typically try to remove this idea from their games so that you can get lost in time, and not realize you spent 4 hours on your phone collecting little gems or killing zombies.
What is a game: This is a big idea to try and conquer, but all I wanted to do was bring it into question. Is PixYPHUS a game? Is it valid? Should it exist? Should others experience it? I made it because I like games, and I liked the idea of making a game where you were Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountainside. There would be no set goals in the game. There would be no real beginning and there would be no real end. It’s a pixel pushing a boulder up a mountain. Actually it’s a representation of a pixel pushing a representation of a boulder up a mountain. Actually it’s a representation of a pixel made of pixels pushing a representation of a boulder made of pixels up a representation of a mountain made of pixels. It’s all pixels. There is no boulder or mountain or sky in this or any other game or picture you can view on a mobile phone. It’s a representation. But we’re very good at allowing ourselves to experience these representations as “fact”. Suspension of disbelief. A contrived concept? Probably. But not an invalid one.
The only “point” to the game would be that it can be experienced, and that experience will be different for everyone.
Introversion and Self Control: It’s the questioning of the self that is interesting with PixYPHUS. I worked extremely hard to make the game walk a fine line here, and I’m proud to say I feel accomplished in this goal. The visuals needed to be good enough to get you started and JUST ENOUGH to keep you going. Just enough has its own natural slide into not enough, but that spectrum is different for everyone. It’s all of the other concepts coming together that drive the self control issue. Is it really that you want to stop playing it or is it that you’re just not sure if you should keep playing it. Should you keep going just a little bit longer? What’s the point? Is there a point? Why am I even still holding the screen. My thumb hurts. I’m going to stop soon. Screw this, I’m gonna stop. Just a few second more. Hmmm, another flower. Mk…
And then, unless it was done by accident, the release. And it was your decision to do it. That’s neat.
If it was done by accident, you’re greeted by the hand holding the boulder at the bottom of the mountain, and you have to decide if it’s worth another trip up. That’s neat.
Any of these experiences is perfection to me. I didn’t make it to be “enjoyed” by everyone, but I did make it to give an impression on everyone that plays it. I wanted to make a game that once started, could never end even after you stopped playing it. There are no scores or distance markers, rather it is the experience of playing the game, for however long that may be, that’s important (or not important). This goes very far away from conventional thinking of what makes a game a success, but I don’t have to follow that path with PixYPHUS.
No one else was going to make PixYPHUS, so I did. I’m happy I put many hundreds of hours of effort into it.
Thank you for your words on PixYPHUS. Truly.
I’ve been working on a new game for about 5 months now that is made for mass consumption (AKA the exact opposite of PixYPHUS). I can’t give any details about it now since I still have a few months more work to put into it before I can even get PR started on it, but I would love to have you review it when the time comes, if you’re willing.
I’ve got one last thing I would like to share:
Make any game you want to, but put hard work into it. It doesn’t matter if the world “gets” it. It matters that you put your everything into it. Work hard and grow. It’s about the journey, not the destination, so there’s no point in looking for shortcuts.
Simon, we appreciate your feedback. I definitely agree with your final word of advice.
As for pixyPHUS, I appreciate the high concept, but as a game, it simply didn’t work. There wasn’t much feedback for the user, and no hooks to keep you wanting to complete the task. I must say, I was oddly tempted to reach the end, but gave up after about 10 minutes of pressing the button.
Perhaps this game actually serves as a treatise on the modern human condition and lack of patience. In this ADD generation, many of us do not have the willpower to still our minds.