Pixel Gulp Guide: Eat, Grow, Frenzies, Tail Bites and Every Sea
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Pixel Gulp is our new free game: an eat-and-grow fish game in your browser. You are Pip, a little reef fish at the bottom of the food chain. Eat the fish smaller than you, stay away from the bigger ones, and grow until the bigger ones are on the menu too. There are 20 levels in four seas, and like everything on NoInternet Arcade it keeps working offline after your first visit. This guide covers the controls, how growing works, the bonuses, every danger and how the scoring adds up.
Controls
- Mouse: just move it. Pip swims towards the pointer, so you never have to hold a button. A click gives a short dash.
- Keyboard: arrow keys or WASD swim, Space, Shift or X dashes, P pauses.
- Gamepad: the left stick swims, A, X or a trigger dashes.
- Phone and tablet: turn the phone sideways and play full screen. By default an analog stick swims and a big DASH button sits under your other thumb. Prefer to steer with your finger? Choose OPTIONS > CONTROLS: DRAG: touch anywhere and slide, and Pip follows your finger from where it already is, so your finger never covers the fish.
The dash needs a full DASH bar (top of the screen) and refills in about two seconds. It is the best escape in the game, so keep it for the moment a mouth gets too close.
Eating and growing
Every sea has its own food chain of three kinds of fish, shown at the top left: lit icons are food right now, icons with a red ! are bigger than you. You eat with your mouth: swim your head into a smaller fish. The same rule protects you: only a bigger fish’s mouth can eat you, so brushing past its tail or belly is safe.
Every fish you eat fills the growth bar under the icons. The two marks on the bar are size-ups: after the first one the middle fish of the chain is food, after the second one all three. When the bar is full, the level is won. Losing a life never takes your growth away.
Bonuses
- Frenzy. Eat several fish quickly and the FRENZY letters light up. A full meter starts a frenzy, worth double points; keep it going for a wild frenzy at triple points. Stop eating for a moment and it drains.
- YUM? cravings. Now and then a thought bubble shows one kind of fish. Eat one of those before the bubble pops for a bonus.
- Pearls. Clams on the sea floor open every few seconds. Swim in while one is open to take its pearl.
- Stars sink from the surface, extra-life bubbles (a bubble with a fish in it) and speed bubbles (a lightning bolt) rise from the floor.
Dangers
- Hunters. From the fourth level on, a bigger fish that spots you shows a red !, then chases you. Hunters are always slower than you, so swim away and they give up.
- Jellyfish sting: you freeze for a moment, which is dangerous only if something bigger is close.
- The barracuda shows a !, shivers and aims (a faint red line shows where), then dashes straight down that line. Do not try to outrun it: move out of the line.
- Mines around the sunken ship blow up on touch. They grow back a while later.
- The Great Shadow, a shark in the Glow Deep, eats fish of any size. It is slower than you, so keep moving.
After you lose a life you come back somewhere safe and nothing can eat you for a couple of seconds.
Tail bites
Barracudas and the Great Shadow can never be eaten, but you can bite their tails. Come at them from behind, where their mouth cannot reach you, and bite the tail: big points, and the predator swims off for a while. Three levels (Tail Chaser, Spine Garden and The Great Shadow) ask for tail bites besides a full growth bar; the level card and the HUD show how many.
The four seas
Sunny Shallows
Turquoise water over coral and sand, with glint minnows, sunny tangs and coral groupers. The five levels teach eating and growing, the frenzy, cravings, pearl clams, hunters, stars and extra lives.
Kelp Forest
Swaying kelp, kelp sprats, reef parrots and rose snappers. Jellyfish arrive first, then the barracuda, and Tail Chaser teaches the tail bite. Kelp Gauntlet has two barracudas.
Twilight Wreck
A purple dusk around a sunken ship, with glimmers, banded butterflies and spinefins between chained mines. Spine Garden needs two tail bites, Wreck Raid mixes everything.
Glow Deep
Dark water where only your own light and the glowing fish show the way: lanternfish, hatchetfish and lantern anglers. The Great Shadow arrives in Shadow Alert, and the last level asks for three bites of its tail.
Scoring and the leaderboard
| Thing | Points |
|---|---|
| Small / medium / big fish | 10 / 25 / 50 (x2 or x3 in a frenzy) |
| YUM? craving | 100 (x frenzy) |
| Star | 100 (x frenzy) |
| Pearl | 250 (x frenzy) |
| Tail bite | 150 and more for every bite in a level (x frenzy) |
| Level cleared | 500 |
| Every life left at the end | 300 |
Every level also gives up to three stars: one for clearing it, one for losing no life and one for beating its par time. Your best score on every level is kept, and the Pixel Gulp leaderboards rank your total: the sum of those best scores, so clearing new levels and replaying old ones for a better score both move you up. Hardcore (in the game’s options) gives you a single life per level, on its own board.
Quick tips
- Swim through the middle of a school. Four or five minnows in a second start a frenzy right away.
- Check the icons after a size-up. The fish that chased you a moment ago may be dinner now.
- Sidestep, do not race. Hunters and the shark are slower than you; the barracuda only dashes in a straight line.
- Mind the jellyfish near big fish. A sting is harmless on its own, not with a mouth nearby.
- Pearls first in a calm moment. A clam stays open for a couple of seconds; wait beside it, not on top of it.
Pixel Gulp saves your cleared levels, stars and best times on your device, and with your account when you are signed in. Signed-in players can also earn stars in the daily quests and spend them on fish skins in Rewards: Koi Pip, Neon Pip and Golden Pip.