Pixel Ripped 1995 review: games inside games, mediums inside mediums

Every installment in the Pixel Ripped series homages a different era of video games, so far recreating the look and feel of productions from the 70s (Pixel Ripped 1978), 80s (Pixel Ripped 1989) and 90s (Pixel Ripped 1995). In Pixel Ripped 1995, we play a young boy named David, who gets his hands on all the latest titles—cutting edge stuff in his world, but trips down memory lane for people (such as myself) old enough to have played the kind of titles this game is hat-tipping, available back in the day in a whopping 16 bits. 

There’s a double inception going on: we play David in the game world, and in that world he plays other games. The first one he/we play loosely emulates the style of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The twist is that playing the game inside Pixel Ripped 1995 involves dealing with elements that encroach on David’s ability to remain immersed in it. For instance, as we play the Zelda-esque game, David’s mother walks around the room, making work calls and periodically coming up and turning off the console, spitting out lines like “David, I don’t want you wasting your youth!”

The irony is that in her efforts to make us stop playing, another gameplay element has been added to the tier of reality one Russian doll above her. In order to distract mum, we must fire pellets from a toy gun to mess up areas of the kitchen and lounge room; while she cleans it up we return to playing. The underlying concept here is pretty trippy, involving the space around playing becoming a play space. It gets trippier when strange creations from inside the game David’s playing escape their consoles and create carnage on the rug in front of him. 

It’s a shame the gameplay can be exhaustingly repetitive, and that there’s no compelling narrative threading it together. The experience doesn’t actually begin with David, but instead with us playing Dott: a character situated in a highly pixelated game world that’s attacked by a cartoonish villain named Cylin Lord. He’s thrown this world into chaos, stolen a precious stone from it, a yada yada; this prologue helps like gibberish, and exists to narratively justify Dott and David becoming, in effect, physically connected, the former syncing up to the latter in order to channel his video game prowess. 

I especially appreciated the second key scenario, when David is playing console machines at a video store while his father looks for something to rent. This sounds like more gobbledegook, but stay with me: a magical creature has synced the two consoles together, so that objects can be passed from one to the other. For example when the character we’re controlling on the console to our left hits a wall (literally) we can switch to the game on our right, locate a special bomb, then switch back to the other game, bringing the bomb with us.

Many VR productions incorporate moments in which the player dons a headset while inside the experience, evoking the concept of spiraling realities and simulations inside simulations. The Pixel Ripped series approaches this idea in a different way, those interior simulations being representations of other artistic mediums, i.e. retro video game consoles, which have their own distinguishing features and modalities. This views VR as an transparent medium or all-encompassing platform—almost another base level reality—capable of accommodating any number of other mediums inside it. 

In the words of VR pioneer Chris Milk: “what we’re talking about is a medium that disappears, because there is no rectangle on the wall, and there is no page you’re holding in your hand.” If the medium of VR disappears, the mediums inside VR, in Pixel Ripped 1995, are vivid, pronounced, talk to each other, and have their own language and functions. Everything gets mixed up in a strange metatextual soup. The gameplay might be simplistic and repetitive, but there’s a hell of a lot to think about.