Adding to the heavy-hitting games this week is Bogazici University student Talha Kaya’s narrative platformer Ode to Pixel Days. The player is able to go back in time, thereby pixelizing himself to the point where he looks appealing to the cheerleader that dismissed him earlier. Or, so Hans tries.

Kaya writes in, “The game is played in a castle that represents the world created by Hans’ mind. The game’s artistic goal is to put the players in Hans’ mind, to make them play through his emotional experiences, hopes and dreams. The core experience of the game is the feelings a boy goes through when he gets into puberty: loneliness, sadness, low self-esteem, the desire to change things about you and everything around you.”



The game felt deeply personal, and Kaya confirmed it for me. “The inspiration came from all the things I experienced in my head when I was a teenager, I felt left-out for no apparent reason, I felt ugly, all kinds of stuff like that. In a situation like that what a teenager generally does is to try to change the world, make the world where he can live in peace and happiness. That’s not possible in the real world at all. What happens in the real world is you suffer until you find yourself some inner-peace. But in Hans’ world, he finds his own way to do change the world to whatever he likes.”

See what happens in Hans’ world in Ode to Pixel Days on Max Games, Kongregate or Newgrounds.