Due to the strict limitations imposed on them, Pico-8 games aren’t the easiest to review. On the other hand, those same restrictions can also force creators to pare away all but the most essential elements of a game, much like a lapidarist facets a jewel, in the process transforming a crude idea into a digital diamond. The most obvious example of this is Celeste, which went from a demo on the Pico-8 to a massive multi-platform success.
Even though Celeste debuted 10 years ago, the Pico-8 scene is still going strong, and there are new titles being released all the time. Some of them are very much worth highlighting.
Dice Hunters
Two-player co-op games are a rarity in the world of Pico-8, but Dice Hunters manages to make it work in this roguelike arena shooter. The goal is to fight your way to the bottom of a five-floor dungeon to grab the Legendary Dice and claw your way back out.
There are four playable characters to choose from, each with a unique auto-aiming weapon, necessitating a unique strategy. Blue shoots a rapid-fire, low-impact pistol; pink lobs big bubbles with a bit of knockback; orange sprays a stream of fire; and green lays down long-fused area-of-effect bombs. I’m not ashamed to admit, I have yet to survive the dungeon. Like many Pico-8 games, Dice Hunters is hard in all the right ways, so when you survive to face the boss on the last floor, it feels really good (even if it does mop the floor with you).
For the most part, Dice Hunters makes the most of its limited resources. Character and weapon design, in particular, stand out for their creative use of color to differentiate themselves. One place where it could do better is in how power-ups are implemented. They’re only dropped at the end of a floor, so you can only use them at the beginning of the next floor. I would rather have random drops or the option to hold a power-up until I needed it.
| Developer | Genre | Price |
| Catagama | Arena shooter roguelike | $4.99 |
You won’t be good at this on your first playthrough; instead, you’ll have to put in the time to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of each enemy and your chosen weapon until you make it out of the dungeon alive.
Cattle Crisis
What do you do when aliens invade and start stealing the cows? You jump in your jet and get your cattle back. That’s the satisfyingly simple premise of Cattle Crisis, one of the best-looking shmups on the Pico-8.
The game is just one level, and the goal is to fight your way to the boss, saving as many cows as you can along the way. The more cows you save, the more you can fill your hyper gauge to temporarily power up your jet, or better yet, max out your gauge to unleash a screen-clearing bomb.
There are two things that Cattle Crisis does really well that make it stand out from similar shmups. The first is the buttery smooth movement. Both your jet and the enemies’ bullets glide across the screen without any frame dropping or stuttering, meaning if you have the skills, you can survive the bullet hell. The other thing it nails, which the best titles in the genre often match, is color management. Given that the Pico-8 only allows 16 colors on the screen at once, it’s a small miracle (and a mark of a good developer) that Cattle Crisis looks as polished as it does, and none of the many on-screen elements gets lost in the chaos.
| Developer | Genre | Price |
| Lazy Devs Academy | Shmup | $5 |
It doesn’t feel like it should be possible to make a game with this much frenetic movement and vibrant color for the Pico-8, but Cattle Crisis pulls it off and does it masterfully. If this were a quarter muncher, I’d be broke.
Solid Rogue
You’re an elite stealth agent, and you’ve just stolen the plans to a world-ending nuclear weapon. The only problem is that there are 20 floors of hyper-vigilant guards standing between you and the extraction team waiting to whisk you away to freedom. Do you have what it takes to survive?
Solid Rogue describes itself as a tactical espionage coffeebreak roguelike, and honestly, that may be the most precise genre definition I’ve come across in a while. The gameplay rewards careful movement and taking your time, but it’s still really easy to die and start back at the bottom of a procedurally generated enemy base. It’s the combination of these two factors that makes Solid Rogue so rewarding. Even though you might get burned by RNG a dozen times, when you make it up to the higher floors, it feels like a real accomplishment.
Compared to the previous two titles on this list, the colors are much more muted, but given the fog-of-war mechanic, it adds to the mood of the game. The only thing I felt was missing was checkpoints. I was so proud of myself for reaching floor 10 that it really hurt to get ganked and have to start over.
| Developer | Genre | Price |
| Grimmrobe Games | Tactical espionage roguelike | $4 |
From the on-the-nose intro dialogue to the simple yet rewarding stealth gameplay, Solid Rogue is clearly a love letter to (and parody of) the Metal Gear games. You won’t find the same depth of story here, but you will find lots of replayability.
Limitation can be a feature
Like most good Pico-8 games, there’s a fair bit of difficulty to these titles. Since they’re smaller games, the challenge is higher so you don’t blow through them on your first sitting. And much like the 8-bit games of yore, you’ll have to read the manual (or in this case, the game’s website) if you want to fully understand the mechanics or get a glimpse of the lore. You can play all of these games for free on their Itch.io pages, but these are the kinds of devs that deserve your dime, so I recommend you pay for the carts like I did so they make more games.
