Saturday Casual Gaming 226: Coloring Pixels

Since I started gaming with handhelds back in the 1990s, you can guess that I love me some pixels. I love 8- and 16-bit (and 32-bit!) images. I love the creativity inherent in stacking colored blocks to make things look recognizable or to come up with something brand new! It's always wonderful.

And since I draw and color and paint, you might be able to guess that I love coloring books.

I do not have a ton of space for coloring books, however, so the recent boom in digital coloring books has been a major boon to me! I was bumming around last year on Steam and found this:

From ToastieLabs, this is Coloring Pixels

Coloring Pixels is a really cool free-to-play coloring book you can download from Steam and fill in beautiful pixel art images that range from incredibly simple shapes to incredibly lush scenes. I love the way it looks, the fact that there are occasionally overlays for holidays (there was snow around Christmas, drifting slowly over the screen, and the edges of the screen were, I believe, on fire around Halloween) just makes it more fun!

Now, I'm the kind of coloring person who likes to finish one color before moving on to the next, which works really easily on small images, but when you get here...

Well... once you get into the crazy amount of colors, things go much slower.
Much. Much slower.

But your reward for finishing each image is that wonderful sense of accomplishment from completing a very difficult task! And it really does feel like an accomplishment. You feel like you've done something, and on days when I literally can't will myself out of bed, that can be soothing.

It's not done, yet, but this is a zoomed-in portion of that same image!
Looooook at allllll that deeeeetaaaaaaiiillllll!

Now, the argument can certainly be made that these sorts of things are not, technically, games, but I'm going to count it because it was free, it makes me happy, it requires input, and you are, technically, finishing tasks to get to an end goal. The tasks are just "input all colors in the appropriate locations" and the end goal is just "finish the picture"...

I did mention that it's only kind of a free game. There is DLC. The DLC is really cool, but it also costs money, which means it isn't happening for me. I mean, there are 12 DLC packs (all of which sound fun), and none of them are more than a dollar. The only reason the "Buy All" function on Steam tells you it's over sixteen dollars is the addition of a downloadable copy of the soundtrack. While the music is pretty fun, it's not something I'm dying to download, but I can always appreciate wanting people to pay you for the music.

That wasn't sarcasm. I've played music in a community band before. The number of people who took "community band" to mean "free of charge because we're not famous" was horrific. No, we will not play your wedding for free. The band itself does have financial needs. Like renting practice space and buying water.

What I'm saying here is, I don't think soundtracks should always be free to download. It's cool when a company can afford to do it, but I'm not going to be butthurt when it's under seven bucks.

If they were charging twenty bucks for the soundtrack, then I'd be butthurt.

But yes, the art you're coloring, the colors you use, the soundtrack, the little extras (like the holiday particle effects), and the overall game itself are more than worth your time if you need a moment of zen!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC