It all started in primary school, when the teacher would wheel in an old box of a TV and fumble around for ten minutes trying to get a vaguely educational program onto the screen. These were the moments when my class was perhaps the most engaged, as the DVD player fell asleep and the screensaver kicked in: the logo began bouncing around the screen, ever-avoiding the corner sweet spot.
Finally I've been able to experience the sheer joy of watching the logo bounce perfectly off the corner with 10 Million Pixels and its Steam Next Fest demo.
It starts off simple enough: Among the millions of 2D pixels there's a small gap. You launch a ball and watch as it starts bouncing off the walls slowly whittling down the health of each pixel until it's destroyed, giving you a point. You use these points to buy more balls to launch into the ever growing hole.
But that's not all, come on now. Scattered around the map are pink gems power-ups and if you manage to carve a path to them and actually get a ball to bounce into it then you can use them to either power up your balls or unlock different kinds. You can make them faster, do more damage, or even allow you to reuse an existing ball.
I started out with the basic orange ball, then went on to the toxic green ball that deals escalating tic damage to the pixel block it hits. After that I got the blue ball which is slightly quicker, and then the pink ball which is even speedier. The final ball in the demo is the lightning ball that can shock nearby blocks, breaking them as it passes.
I had more fun than I probably should have passively launching balls into the ever-growing mines and watching them whittle down all the pixels. It wasn't just satisfying to watch but also to hear as the ball hitting and breaking blocks emanates a warm popping sound. There's also incredibly chill lo-fi music on in the background which honestly nearly sent me to sleep; it's lovely.
Oh, but there is a point to 10 Million Pixels. You're on a mission to break all the pixels in order to find the one golden pixel. This can be located anywhere in the map, and while you occasionally do get a special golden ball which can point you in its general direction, the only guaranteed way of finding it is to break all the pixels.
It took me around 40 minutes to find the golden pixel in the demo, although the full game will have different maps that hide varying solid objects that cannot be broken inside. I carried on playing even after I found the golden pixel because I wanted to see what said object is. It turned out to be an image of an angel and devil with a fish's skeleton hanging upside down from a balloon and hook between the two. I don't know what that means, I don't know how that's meant to pertain to breaking pixels, but I do know that I enjoy breaking pixels, and that's all that matters.
