PixARK

The fever pitch surrounding the final season of Game of Thrones often served as a barometer for how insufferable a person’s opinion can be. Twitter was a swamp of those claiming to have never seen the show, proclaiming it from the mountaintops like a point of pride. Somehow, being detached from the show made you cooler and edgier and everyone needed to know. Through multiple faults of my own, I’ve only seen the first season but often felt a tinge of guilt for missing out on what appears to be a captivating piece of entertainment.

Yet I’ve never felt any such guilt when confessing that I’ve never played Minecraft. At one point the game’s insane success tempted me. I would see young children playing it and was glad there was an easily digestible product that could get them into gaming. I read countless articles about the baffling structures and crafted things people hosted on their servers. But my refusal to play Minecraft often boiled down to the fact that I just didn’t really care, it did nothing for me. Yeah, I’m totally cool.

PixARK enters the fray as a game attempting to win over multiple audiences. As the name suggests, it’s a “pixel” version of ARK: Survival Evolved, a game where players can ride dinosaurs and shoot rocket launchers at dragons. Unlike Minecraft, ARK had a certain appeal because it took survival mechanics, fantasy, science fiction, and crafting and threw them into a blender. While ARK dips more into combat and large-scale encounters of base raids, the game maintains crafting and survival as its core. However, a punishing difficulty and a large amount of grind is likely going to turn off a large group of players who just want to put a saddle on a dinosaur and ride it around.

What PixARK aims to do is extend the reach of the ARK IP and its mechanics by putting them into something a broad audience can appreciate and latch onto. This is immediately evident in Snail Games’ use of voxels to build each randomly generated world and its inhabitants. By doing so, the fundamental survival experience in PixARK is much kinder than in its realistic brother. Players who were hunted by whatever bloodthirsty creature would have to run away on solid ground hoping to find higher ground or some better method of retreat. In PixARK, the terrain can literally be altered, destroyed, and built upon to create an impromptu safe haven.

Minecraft players will recognize this simple building block of potential and what it means for the next few minutes or hundreds of hours. Punching trees may be a meme at this point but it works in PixARK as well. Snail wears the influence on its sleeve but does so smartly. If the formula has worked for Minecraft, why would it not work here? When a player is given free reign to shape the world around them and rework it to their own desires, it creates an endless sandbox of possibility. It may not result in every playable moment being fun but the freedom can often be intoxicating. Feeding curiosity is one of the most appealing parts of gaming and at every turn in PixARK, a moment may exist to entice a player to forage on and see something new.

Because the world is represented by cobbled-together blocks, visualizing the blueprints for structures and contraptions is easier. The visual fidelity in PixARK is sharper and more colorful than most of what I’ve seen in Minecraft. Outside of sheer vibrancy, players should have little problem understanding what a block of terrain actually is just by looking at it. Snow is seen as a white block with snowflake patterns on it, rocks are dark hues and pile on top of each other to make mountains. Everything is destructible and terraforming a server can be done block by block.

Hundreds of materials and objects can be collected and crafted over the course of a player’s journey in PixARK. After using an admirable character creator, players will drop into a server from a determined spawn point and begin working towards whatever purpose they desire. The first logical steps are crafting the tools to survive including an axe, a pick, and some clothes. With hunger, stamina, health, and temperature being concerns, food and clothing will need to be made. No one will ever be placed into a game of PixARK and just be stuck. There’s always a solution to a problem but it’s easier said than done.

To learn blueprints and recipes for crafting, players will need to level up and use the points earned to spend on a blueprint. This creates a controlled drip of understanding into the game. Just about anything in PixARK earns a player experience. Crafting an object for the first time, harvesting materials, and staying alive are the main ways players begin to earn experience to unlock more and more. Multiple crafting trees force players to learn previous recipes or meet a required level before being able to unlock them. Of course, the more complex and technically (or magically) enhanced an item is, the harder it will be to make.

During the process of leveling up, the limitations of having PixARK on a console started to bubble up. Without a mouse, navigating through menus is a slow process. Completing any action requires multiple button presses and movements of the directional sticks. A wrong button press may cause you to leave the menu or do something incorrectly. The menus and user interface are big and bold and mostly easy to read but being such a slog to go through impedes the pace of the game. When I first started on PlayStation 4 I had difficultly placing blocks whether in first- or third-person. It took me several minutes to figure out how to equip a piece of clothing on my character because I wasn’t sure if I was in the right menu or if I was pressing the wrong button.

These issues are perhaps the greatest thing holding PixARK back on console. When I first began playing it was before the game received an update that helped with the steep initial learning curve. I spent over a half an hour wandering around a server by myself looking for thatch and fiber, two crucial ingredients in the most basic of recipes. Eventually I just Googled it and saw that I could get them from grass and bushes. The game does not tell you this and there is no indication that you can just pull on the grass on a tile. Thankfully, it appears that the game now indicates an object can be interacted with by a prompt appearing.

Though moments like this make me feel a bit dense, in a survival game it can be difficult to know when its the fault of the player or the fault of the game. I understand that part of the appeal of these games is being dropped into a scenario and then doing what you please. Players looking for guidance or direction should be cautious. Quests and objectives are mostly nebulous and accomplished through a player feeding into their curiosity. Though that sense of freedom and danger can be fun, it does not make the steep initial learning curve any easier. My first several hours with PixARK were spent just trying to figure things out and getting a feel for the world. Once I felt like I had conquered the menu navigation to an extent, I allowed myself the time to dig dozens of blocks into the ground to see what was at the bottom and bravely climb a mountain.

Multiplayer exists in PixARK and when players are in a server with others they can form tribes, be antagonistic, or live in peace. Unless wandering into a high level area, there won’t be much danger in a monster attacking. Approaching another player or an idle animal shows their respective level so you have a good indication to what kind of threat might be in store. I hopped into multiple servers and was impressed with the structures players had built and knew that I would never be that good or patient to create anything of equal awe. Players aren’t really forced to babysit their character but it took me awhile to understand how different environments and status effects can hinder play. Of course, the thrill of riding a dinosaur through the air or on land is great and simple. When PixARK opens up, it becomes a very welcoming game with a lot of charm.

It’s hard to say if PixARK would win over any player who has actively steered away from games like Minecraft or ARK. Because PixARK is so intrinsically linked to those experiences, I doubt it can make much of a convincing argument. But games like this exist because they appeal to a certain audience that just loves having a sandbox to play in. If your goal is to start out with nothing and then wield magic and technology like a god, well that’s certainly possible. If your goal is to goof off with friends or have hopefully harmless interactions with others online, you can find it here. The point of PixARK is to be an engaging, entertaining, and evolving game. While it is often buried under less-than-intuitive console menus, the simple pleasures of PixARK aren’t far away.