These Lights Make My Dumb Gamer Brain a Little Too Happy

The bare walls of my bedroom—bedecked as they are with sporadic small prints but devoid of lights—demand I add some flair to my usually nerdy living space. The Govee Gaming Pixel Light seemed to fit the bill a little too well when I saw it back at CES 2025. The specialized display doesn’t support enough colors to show all my favorite 8- or 16-bit artwork at their best quality, and it won’t produce strong enough audio for anything more complicated than classic chiptunes. If the digital art and speaker for my desk didn’t sport cringey decals and a frame that would make visitors assume I chugged Mountain Dew Game Fuel for breakfast, it would be the perfect antidote to my dull apartment.

Govee sent me a pair of pre-release Gaming Pixel Lights long before the company finally made them available on May 19. It sat on my desk for ages, showing me a 32-pixel version of Samus from Super Metroid. Her staunch, visored visage helped me get through the hectic days. Both the $120 32×32 and $140 52×32 pixel frames don’t take much effort to set up, though the digital wall or desk art lacks a battery and needs to be plugged into an outlet. Once it’s connected through the Govee Home app, you’ll have a wide variety of default and user-made effects to add to the screen. Yes, you can stick a static image on the screen, but the real fun comes from displaying GIFs of scenes from your favorite 8-, 16-, or perhaps a few 32-bit retro games.

Depending on how complicated your image is, the pixel light may have a harder time displaying every pixel with perfect color accuracy. The smaller device contains 1,024 lights, while the 52×32 version sports 1,664. The $155 Divoom Pixoo-64—a competing pixel light with a 64×64 pixel field—supports 4,096. Considering the limited lights, a 32×32 pixel image of ET might look great on the smaller Pixel Light, but a fan-made 8-bit portrait of Arielle from The Little Mermaid that appears fine on my phone lacked the color definition necessary to show fine features on her nose or hair. The more stark the colors, the better each image or GIF will appear. The screen is bright enough on its highest settings, but you can set it to dim or turn off on a timer if you want to sleep without a rainbow of pixelated light shining at you.

Images look marginally better on the larger display thanks to its wider range of colors, but you’ll still need to try out various images until you find one that fits your style. You can also upload your own artwork to the Govee app, though any of your photos you take from your phone will turn out splotchy and incoherent on the Pixel Light. You may find that uploading your own pixel art could produce mixed results. I had to try several different versions of Samus before I found a Metroid image that didn’t look half bad. The GIFs play at 30 fps, which made a GIF of Sonic’s classic spinning leg running animation look extra smooth. Divoom’s similar offering runs at 24 fps.

The device includes a rear 3W DSP speaker made for pairing your favorite chiptunes with this artwork. The built-in speakers aren’t enough to fill a room with sound, but even without much bass, it’s just enough to offer a retro feel, as if I was listening to a game on the age-old mono Game Boy speaker. The device itself has a single button for controlling volume and no physical mute button, which means you’re forced to load into the app just to adjust your sound. All this meant I was more likely to eschew music entirely. After all, if you’re planning to use your Govee Pixel Light to spruce up your gaming room, you’ll end up listening to the game you’re playing anyway.

If you’re the type to pick up a brush, you could create your own art and animated GIFs with the sketch mode. It’s certainly easier to use with a stylus, but I don’t have the time, patience, or ability to sketch something that will look any nicer than the artists who do pixel art for a living. The device has almost too many modes, from a clock feature to a stock ticker. There’s even a counter to tell you the current price of bitcoin, as if you really need to pay attention to crypto prices on your fun, cute pixel monitor.

The Pixel Light seems to think gamers want a very specific aesthetic, one full of cyberpunk-esque hard-edged contours with decals reading “loading” and “game.” A black frame is all I really need. The art is the reason you buy Govee’s first real gamer product. But damn me if I enjoy it blaring the Magmar Caverns theme from my desktop, as if my bedroom had any more need for even more Metroid artwork.