Bit of a trip, this game. You play as a flying eyeball with a tail? Like a one eye snake that flies around? I dunno. Change color when you change directions too. You can speed up and slow down and blink and that's about it. Touch pad also makes the body like glitch out almost and go static-y. It's neat to just fly around and watch colors change and make basic shapes with the trail of your snake body.

The actual game is pretty neat. You go to different areas/worlds/levels and interact with things their in the way the space dictates. One level has you swim through water and interact with fish, one has you in like a theme park where people ride you and you can put them in rides and make those work, hell one is even like a series of grids where you can only move in 90 degree angles and have to do various tasks in that way. Each area feels pretty unique in terms of looks or how you move or what goes on and it's always fun to see what the next one has in store.

The core point of this game too is to find 16 other one eye snake guys like you. Each one has their own level but not all levels have one I think? Anyway the whole game is like "the friends we made along the way" meme but real. Each snake friend is directly related to the world its in and it's really fun to find them after solving whatever problem the world throws at you. Each friend is also accompanied by a short motion comic type thing that shows how they ended up where you find them.

Hohokum is a charming feel good game to play. It's a bit weird at first but it quickly becomes just fun to roam around and find things out. There's a bunch of little extras to reward people who explore and play with thing just for the sake of it. Also each level has it's own banger song so the whole game is like playing a really good record. Definitely recommend to anyone. A short enjoyable trip with some light puzzle solving.

I love it. Contains the best joke about breaking pots in video games of all time. I want to frame it on my wall. I just might.

Hohokum is a game about the novelty of movement in the medium. It is what would happen if Mario made a WarioWare game - taking a gimmick so far as to invert it back into a bonafide mechanic. All you can do is move. Everything else is contextual. You can hold one button to move faster, and another to move slower, but the entire game can be easily finished without touching anything besides the joy stick.

While a lesser game might be content with the bare minimum, Hohokum has three different control styles. Press the shoulder buttons to turn the player snake relative to their heading. Drag your finger along the touchpad to move faster and sharper than sticks or buttons allow. Having options makes however you play feel like an active choice, even when you'll likely forget the less favored schemes even exist.

This near-invisible dedication is necessary, because minimalist graphic art styles only work with consistent careful thought put into them. Lose momentum for even a second, and the audience will quickly discern when restraint is being used as a mask for lack of ability. Goofy art styles are even trickier, because their strength is to make the aburd approachable and the familiar foreign. Fail in the balance of either, and you will be relegated to the junkyard of hacks.

It is then with great confidence that Hohokum barely explains its nonsense objectives. It trusts the player's curiosity to find the fun in the concepts the developers dreamed up. Sometimes a level can be an entire theme park. Sometimes a level can contain an entire theme park completely unrelated to anything you have to do to progress the level! Sometimes a transition screen consists of nothing more than dandelion puffs to puff. I respect when a game includes more without trying to overstate its importance.

Maybe all I did was wiggle a control stick around for a few hours, but that's not what I remember doing. I filled a constellation with stars, I poisoned an octopus until it turned into an anchor, I threw monkeys throwing bananas until an elephant kicked off a king's hat. Maybe growing eggplants felt like a total drag, and I was disappointed by the obligatory dark cave level, but overall I have great fondness for the love and silliness.

3 stars, B rank. I want more just like it. In an era where even indie games are suffering from feature creep and seek to emulate video game product bloat, it's nice to play something so dedicated to an experience so simple. Relaxing and quirky not because it was trying to be "cozy", but was trying to be fun.