The McPixel series from developer Sos Sosowski is one of those heavily layered affairs. It is a parody of MacGruber, a Saturday Night Live sketch that itself was a parody of the eighties-tastic TV show MacGyver starring the dreamy Richard Dean Anderson. Truly a greater feathered mullet does not exist. But back to the games. The fact that you’re already parodying a parody means that you’re probably even sillier and more over the top than the parody you’re parodying. This is absolutely true with McPixel. The original McPixel launched on mobile back in 2012 and offered a strange blend of point-and-click adventure puzzle solving with Warioware-style mini-games, all tied together with low brow humor, and somehow that strange mix worked out super well.

Now here we are more than a decade later, and thanks to the money-grubbing monsters at Devolver Digital we now have the latest game in the series McPixel 3 on our mobile devices. You might be asking yourself, “Should I play McPixel 2 before picking up this sequel?" and my answer to you would be YES, it is absolutely imperative that you play through McPixel 2 first before playing McPixel 3. NONE of this is going to make any sense, and the entire story continuity will be ruined, if you don’t play McPixel 2 first. Drop what you’re doing, go out into the world, and don’t stop until you’ve tracked down McPixel 2 and played through it in its entirety. Then play through it again to unlock the Good Ending. Then a third time for the Bad Ending. I’ll wait here until you’re done.

Just kidding, there is no McPixel 2. It turns out there was just so much McPixel in this new McPixel that they had to skip McPixel 2 and go straight to McPixel 3. Or something? It doesn’t matter, if you enjoyed the first game then you likely already know what to expect here. More very silly setups where you need to prevent a bomb from exploding in increasingly absurd and obtuse ways. More potty humor. More discovering hidden little secrets and gags and generally just poking around in every corner of the game to see what you can find. I think Shaun put it best when he reviewed McPixel 3 for Switch last fall, “If you don’t vibe with McPixel 3’s extremely quirky sense of humor, you’ll have a miserable time with it. If you do? You’ll have a great time chasing down every last gag, good or bad." I’m someone who vibes and I’m having a blast with McPixel 3, and maybe you will too.