Pixel Life belongs to a small tradition of games that use play, rather than text, to say something about being alive — the best known of them being Jason Rohrer's Passage from 2007, a five-minute game that gave a generation of players their first experience of grief in an interactive medium. These works are usually short by design: a life fits into one sitting precisely because that compression is the point.

The rules here are simple and none of them can be undone. Time is spent whether you move or not — a detour costs years, and so does standing still long enough to think about it. The way ahead is always open and the way back never is, which is less a puzzle than a statement. Travelling with someone changes what the road is worth: they walk in single file behind you, gathering what you pass and sharing whatever the way throws at you, which is both the comfort and the exposure of not being alone.

How long you last is not fixed at the start. Companionship, children, comfortable means and moderation all lengthen the span; heavy drinking shortens it, and no amount of gold buys back a year already spent. Not every life is allowed to run its course, either: some end suddenly and by chance, and the game names what happened rather than leaving it abstract. There is no winning position and no way to survive the ending, only different lives to have led — which is why the game asks, at the close, what kind of life yours turned out to be.