Pyramida: Balancing Survival with Pixel Art Charm
At just $2.99, Pyramida offers village building and monster fighting in a challenging and cute package.
last updated Dec 14, 2023
At a price that rivals your daily caffeine fix, Pyramida is the kind of game that charms, frustrates, and enchants.
The Trials and Tribulations of Pixel Village Life
Pyramida serves up a scrappy survival scenario that harkens back to the roots of the RTS genre—think Age of Empires if it ran on a graphing calculator. It's about keeping your digital denizens hustling from dawn to dusk, chopping wood, harvesting wheat, and taking potshots at skeletons when night falls. The labor is constant, the threat persistent, and your managerial skills perpetually tested. And if thoughts of walling up skeletons sound too unorthodox, well, one tactic's as good as another in the pursuit of not being dead.
A Symphony of (Mostly) Chirping Crickets
Rip off those headphones—Pyramida's audio landscape is a barren wasteland where the sound of silence reigns supreme, with skeleton bones rattling being the only occasional break in the ambiance. More alarming is the in-game inability to tweak audio levels, so keep a finger on your system volume, lest you be fully embraced by the deafening stillness or assaulted by any unexpected sounds of pixelated peril.
8-Bit Nostalgia with Modern Framerate Frustrations
The pixel art in Pyramida would make any '90s kid go pixel-eyed with nostalgia. The art is a love letter to simpler times, back when the number of pixels on-screen was directly proportional to your imagination. Performance, however, is a different beast, with pathfinding issues occasionally chugging down the framerate like a processor from the Stone Age. Sure, some can chalk up these fumbles to the indie charm, but if any villagers are lost to the lag monster, expect blood-curling screams akin to losing a Tamagotchi.
Bugs in the Desert Sand
Ah, bugs—the spices of indie games that can occasionally give you food poisoning. Players may encounter spirited skeletons defying physics to glitch through walls, or villagers exhibiting an advanced form of cognitive defiance as they refuse to do the simplest tasks, seemingly calling for unionized labor rights in the digital realm. It's a constant battle, not just against hunger or ancient curses but also against the digital demons of debugging.
Occasionally Frustrating but Always Engaging
Despite its simplicity, Pyramida reveals layers like an onion—or perhaps like layers of sediment around its titular pyramid. There's a surprising depth to be uncovered, assuming you can survive the brutal onslaught of bones and starvation. It's a game that requires the patience to manage each villager, the strategic prowess to optimize survival, and the chill attitude to not hurl your mouse across the room when your workers decide to have an existential crisis mid-harvest.
STEAM RATING
Developer & Publisher
Sokpop Collective
Release Date
August 14, 2020
The Verdict
Pyramida punches well above its weight class—delivering a pixel-perfect hook right to the feels of nostalgia while making your modern gamer brain sweat over the survival stakes. At a price that rivals your daily caffeine fix, it's the kind of game that charms, frustrates, and enchants. You shouldn't expect a feature-rich, balanced RTS utopia. Instead, buckle up for a delightful indie rollercoaster, creatively designed but with its fair share of bumps and bruises. You'll come for the endearing pixel art and stay for the grueling, yet rewarding, village micromanagement. Pyramida is a testament to the heights that indie passion projects can reach, and it's cheap enough to make any risk-taking gamer's wallet heave a sigh of relief.
