Axel & Pixel

"Axel & Pixel is another title from the "What the hell is this?" Vault. Axel is a painter and Pixel is his dog. They get lulled to sleep by some weird ass rat creature, and in the dreamworld, they must chase said weird ass rat creature through numerous locations representing the seasons to get a key the rat's bogarting, which will unlock a door back to reality. While in this dreamworld, you try to collect tubes of paint and find vistas to sketch in order to finish a painting out in the real world.

They call it an adventure game, but I contest that it is not. It's more like a hidden object game. You're presented with a scene, and you mouse over things until your cursor changes to a hand, indicating you can interact with the object. You click it, things happen, and new things will become glowy and clickable as a result. To break up this gameplay, there are a couple odd mini-games thrown in between scenes, one where you navigate a hot air balloon through a cavern, one where you drive a monster truck over hills and across gorges, and a third where you navigate a sailboat down the river, avoiding whirlpools.

It's a fairly odd game. The art style reminds me of Terry Gilliam's animations in Monty Python because it looks to be composed of existing images that have been Photoshopped together to make a scene. Axel and Pixel themselves are drawn, and there's a few 3d creatures thrown in there, but for the most part, it looks like someone went to town with some scissors and paste.

The audio might be the most enjoyable thing to me just because it's weird. There's no dialogue, but Axel does talk...but they're like nonsense sounds. Things like: Ahhhya! Oh ho! Aww doh doh. Aidoh! It's weird, but you get the meaning behind the sounds based on the inflection of his voice. This game was made in the Czech Republic, so it was definitely easier to merely translate the sparse text to whatever language rather than bother with getting a voice actor for each language.

I went through the entire game in less than 3 hours. When I got to the end, and Axel starts painting a scene of the four seasons, there are holes not filled in. He starts to pin up sketches he took during the game and fills in those holes. I missed one... Whoops. He then starts to paint. He can only paint three of those sketches. I missed lots of paint tubes... Text then appears on screen telling me that Axel didn't finish his painting, and then the credits roll.

...

Listen, Axel and Pixel. You were fine for a distraction from a boring day at work, but you're not nearly fun enough for me to go back and find all those paint tubes. I don't care that much. I figured I'd just watch the ending on Youtube. I find two people who have posted video playthroughs of the game, and much to my dismay, neither of them finished the painting either. Consensus: Axel and Pixel is not actually fun enough to finish.

It's not hard. I could probably do it in another 20 minutes, but it's not worth it. If I hadn't gotten this game in a 2K Bundle during a Steam Sale, I probably never would have even known about it, but now that I do know about it, it's not something I would have paid for on purpose. It's fine for a three hour distraction, but I wouldn't classify what I experienced as fun.