Thoughts About PICO-8 Games' Creativity

Lately, I started to discover games on the fantasy console PICO-8. They're easy games to play for short sessions, and my recorded gameplay is often small enough to upload on 3Speak and YouTube.

If you're new to fantasy consoles, they're self-contained applications that allow for the development and execution of games and programs under the fantasy console's limitations.

PICO-8's limitations created a degree of uniformity between titles released on it. It's easy to recognize a PICO-8 game. They all use the same color palette and boast a 128×128px resolution screen. The code and assets, though compressed, must fit on small 32KB cartridges. Yet there are games for all genres. Some are technical marvels.

Playing a few of these games made me realize: The developers on PICO-8 are so creative despite the limitations, or maybe they're creative because of them. While the resolution is small, and the colors are very limited, I'm amazed at the amount of detail these games manage to cram in.

Some games even started as PICO-8 projects. Celeste being the prime example, though many are Jam games. Some PICO-8 games divide their assets on multiple cartridges. Some games include a creative use of 3D. There's even a 3D Fighting Game.

So far, recorded 4 PICO-8 games, my play sessions vary in length, but they're at least 10 minutes of testing and playing. Click here to watch "Lab Cat", "Pizza Panda", "Suika Game Demake" and "Whiplash Taxi" on 3Speak. All recordings so far are my first-time playthroughs, but I'll be playing games I'm already familiar with soon. (إن شاء الله.) So, I hope you look forward to that.

What do you think?