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 by moving, so every detour has a price measured in years rather than in points. 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 you can reach: two people cannot slip through the narrow gaps where the richest rewards are hidden, so a full life and a wealthy one pull in different directions.

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. 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.