Super Meat Boy-esque game wholeheartedly fails to make good on its promises.
To start with, the game has a decent look to it. The atmosphere is appropriately quirky and the nameless heroine moves fluidly. Additionally, the cutscenes give the game some extra personality while detailing the story of a book that our heroine just can't get rid of. Similarly, the sound design and music are excellent. The soundtrack is loaded with a lot of good tracks that work very well in tandem with the other-wordly vibe that Spooky Squid Games were going for. When the main character dies, she lets loose a shrieking death rattle, the screen color turns sepia, and the music becomes murky and discordant, resulting in an unpleasant moment.
So, the graphics and sound are fine which is great and all, but the gameplay not only feels like a ripoff of Super Meat Boy, but it lacks the refinements in the control and level design like that game. The main character moves much like Meat Boy, except there isn't a run button. She has a double jump that behaves similarly as well. However, the developers put in a combat system. The combat system is certainly flashy and quite cool looking, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. You choose from a stab, a kick, a high kick, a juggle, and a downward kick. Sounds cool, doesn't it? Well, all of those moves are mapped to the same key/button. If you want to stab your opponent, you might end up kicking them. Want to kick them? Then vice-versa. In order to stab them you have to hold the analog stick/movement key and then press the attack button. To kick, you press the button without holding the stick and to high kick you hold the button without holding the stick. While this may not sound like a problem, trying to effectively use these moves when multiple enemies are swarming you is insanely frustrating. It also doesn't help that the enemies are incredibly annoying. Most of them have a much better range than the main character; that is, unless you can get the dash stab to function as it should. When you hold the analog stick and press the attack button while an enemy isn't near you, your character does a little dash attack. However, if you miss, you have to wait for it to recharge and considering that there are spikes and death traps everywhere, the dash attack can frequently make things even more difficult than they already were.
To make matters worse, your character can take three hits. While this may sound like a good thing, it too leads to many frustrations. While this is useful when the obnoxious enemies are rapidly launching themselves at you or attacking you from a place where you can't even get to when you're being swarmed, it's mostly pointless in regards to the games awful platforming. The main character has no recovery time after getting hit, so when you miss a jump (and you will when you're trying to platform while the enemies are trying their best to ruin your day) you fall and either hit spikes that make you bounce until you die without any chance for recovery, or fall onto one-hit-kill spikes that do exactly what their namesake suggests.
In theory the platforming should be fine. The combat is terrible, but the jumping and wall cling/slide mechanics that they stole from Meat Boy should make the platforming a joy, right? Not when the level design is as dreadful as it is here. The levels are a decent size, but they feel haphazardly strewn together, which makes exploring them feel like more of a chore than anything else. The developers also like to spam respawning enemies that teleport and slippery floors all of the time. You thought navigating was difficult when you were simply running and climbing? Try doing it with the godforsaken slippery floors. To make matters even worse, these slippery floors don't act like they should. In most games you'd walk on the floor and if it were covered in ice (or even made of ice) you would slip on them as you moved. Not in this game, though. When you stand on a slippery floor you're going to slip in one direction even when you aren't moving, just because. Now, imagine that you've got spiked walls, platforms, and respawning enemies to worry about and then try to get around when you can't even control your character.
I'd have to say that the biggest problem with this game is that the developers decided that instead of allowing you to have total control over your character as in Meat Boy, the challenge should come from simply taking it away from you. It's difficult to describe the monumental frustration of making it past an area like this only to get repeatedly killed a by a horde of enemies who are faster than you and extremely difficult to hit with the awful combat controls and then subsequently getting sent back to a checkpoint. The checkpoint system is extremely stupid. The developers decided that they needed to try something different to make their rip-off of a game seem more unique, so instead of just crossing a checkpoint you have a checkpoint meter. Collecting items and killing enemies fills up this meter gradually and when it becomes full you're able to place a checkpoint on any regular surface when you aren't close to any enemies. Why they couldn't have just used a regular checkpoint system is beyond me.
In addition, there are collectible pages strewn throughout the levels that are equivalent to the band-aids in Super Meat Boy. Many of them are an absolute chore to get while you navigate countless spikes to acquire them. Exploration and collectible gathering are also hampered by a perspective (which you can at least move with a touch of the right stick) that makes it incredibly difficult to see where you're going or what frustrations are about to show themselves.
Simply put, after all that, I threw my precious controller. I haven't been so purely angered and frustrated by a videogame since I was a teenager, but They Bleed Pixels has shown me that there's always a breaking point. If you can look past all the tedious level design and frustrating combat mechanics, you might be able to have a good time. There's even a good amount of content to explore if you're so inclined to try it. Be warned, though, for They Bleed Pixels is a poorly-designed, badly thought-out game that might aggravate you more than you've been aggravated in quite some time. In short, I paid $2.50 for this game and I still want my damn money back.