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I’m not a crypto guy. I don’t have a wallet and I haven’t invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any silly meme coins. And while I love video games and have written about them for years, the world of crypto gaming is uncharted territory for me.
As such, Pixels—the Ethereum-based online farming game—is something new for me, though it immediately reminds me of another hugely popular game: Pixels is essentially the charming indie gem Stardew Valley, but with a crypto twist.
I cannot stress how similar this game is, visually and mechanically, to Stardew Valley. I’ve been playing both games in recent weeks to see how much the crypto element changes the game, whether it’s an improvement or detriment to enjoyment—and whether “Web2 gamers” like myself can enjoy Pixels without knowing or handling crypto.
Is Pixels worth playing if you don’t care about crypto? And did it ultimately make me want to engage with this space on a deeper level? Here’s my take.
First steps
Getting started in Pixels is easy enough. Kind of. All you have to do is head to the Pixels site, punch in your email address or phone number, and you're in. You don’t currently need a crypto wallet to play, though the login screen mentions that a Ronin wallet will soon be needed. That could be a future hurdle for anyone who doesn’t want to touch the tech.
There's some quick onboarding to the game's major currencies—popberries, gems, and coins, plus the on-chain PIXEL token on Ethereum that players can earn (and that's worth real money). Gems are the currency that you can purchase through external means and are used to buy cosmetic items and such. Popberries you'll grow, and coins you'll obtain by fulfilling orders.
So how do you fulfill orders? A helpful non-playable character (NPC) guide named Barney walks you through using basic tools. When I say that Pixels feels exactly like Stardew Valley, you'll see what I mean here. Your first suite of tools includes a rusty watering can and a basic axe, pickaxe, and shears—nearly the same set of starting tools as in Stardew, and even the naming of the rusty watering can is the same. There's no hoe, though, because you have to use coins to purchase new soil squares.
Your small plot of land comes with a house, six soil squares, four trees, and a mine. The mine isn't something you go into—you just send a cart in there, and a random number generator determines whether you get one of a number of ores, rocks, and the like.
A cold place
In some ways, Pixels offers some nice convenience elements compared to Stardew. Where Stardew wants you to walk between different places, you can move between your farm and the city in Pixels with just a couple of quick clicks. The game also doesn't seem as concerned about you being close to your trees, mine, or plots to interact with them. With that said, they're much larger than Stardew—but you can click on stuff really fast if you want.
But the similarities to Stardew are largely superficial. Yes, you're farming, logging, and mining, and you level those skills up to perform them more quickly or to build more complex items. You also have an energy bar to determine how much stuff you can do in a given sitting.
But you aren't building relationships with other characters—one of Stardew Valley's most rewarding aspects. There's also no passage of time. Stardew Valley has a day and night cycle, as well as seasons that change the look of the game significantly. After a long spelunking adventure in the game's cave system, you'll come out to near total darkness. The relationships and passage of time help to make Stardew Valley feel like a real, warm place.
Pixels, in comparison, feels like a liminal space—but not in the cool, spooky way. The few NPCs that exist are purely functional, standing in for menus for acts like shopping or trading gems. They have no personality. Since you buy things through their benches rather than through the NPCs directly, it also feels like there's no reason for them to be there.
And with no passage of time, it's always daytime. You never sleep, and the lack of seasons make the game feel endless. How long have I been here? A week? A year? Where Stardew Valley is a place I'd love to hang out, Pixels feels like a weird, creepy dream.
Crypto rules everything around me
When you get down to it, Pixels is mostly a series of timers. Before long, you'll have a stoneworking oven, a woodworking bench, and a metalworking bench in your house. But mostly what you're doing is just clicking on them to produce one thing at a time, on a pretty lengthy timer. The list of items is small to start with, and grows slowly.
This is also an online-only game. It's available only through a browser, and when you head to town, you'll find swarms of other players zipping around in bizarre outfits they've purchased with their gems—or displaying their owned NFT avatars.
Anything resembling fun and progression is locked behind gems. Doing enough in the game to make gems in Pixels at the beginning is, as far as I can tell, impossible. It'll be dozens of hours before you can even consider the idea.
Interacting with currencies feels like the primary goal of Pixels, and gameplay comes second to that aim. If you want to interact with the game, it's all but necessary that you interact with the crypto/NFT elements of it. Simply put, Stardew Valley offers a similar experience mechanically, but is much more feature-rich and much more rewarding in every way.
Because I'm not particularly interested in cryptocurrency, there's not really a reason for me to continue to play Pixels. Stardew Valley does everything Pixels does, but adds warmth to it. It's about building a community at least as much as it is about farming fruits and vegetables, making this mechanical imitation feel hollow in its current form.
Pixels really feels about how I expected a crypto game to feel—empty and repetitive. And it's not that crypto games can't be good! There's certainly room out there for someone to crack the question of what gameplay loop would work in a game where you play to earn real-world cryptocurrency. But the derivative Pixels, no matter how charming it may look, isn’t it.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor's note: For another take on Pixels from someone who is already immersed in the world of crypto, be sure to read our original review from February 2024.