Horace

released on Jul 18, 2019

Horace is a story-driven, pixel-platform adventure peppered with nostalgic, popular culture references which will bring a smile to any gamer who enjoys the 8 and 16 bit era!


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A very hard, windingly long for the genre, story-based precision platformer with lots of celebrity cameos and a singular artistic vision from its one-man team Paul Helman, former developer on PS1 PAL-exclusive game Terracon, who describes Horace as "his life's work"
Said vision comes off as that of a British Gen X Dad whose sense of humor consists of quotes from 80s movies and who will share his weed with you, his beloved child, even though you're a year or two underage because "it's better you get it here than from some stranger"
Sounds obnoxious I know but it's a lot more endearing if you have people with some or all of those attributes in your life, give some respect to Gen X they only created the entirety of the cancelled future eternal present pop cultural landscape in which you inhabit, therefore it's okay if their sense of humor is mostly composed of "do you remember That Guy from That Movie"

It's Celeste if it was about a robot trying to attain personhood and if you accept the game on its own pretenses and check your cynicism at the door it's just as likely to make you cry, worked on me at least, yeah I said it this game made me cry, it really goes to faraway places from where it starts and achieves its objective of setting out to be a grand journey encompassing the whole spectrum of human emotion, whether it's grief at the inevitability of death, comedy at the way the main character's unshakable morality and robotic bluntness clash with the world around him, and inconsolable rage at some of these level designs, this game truly has every emotion contained within its couple gigabytes
Inspired by the 1979 film Being There, if that means anything to you, it's a coming-of-age story that starts out feeling a little childish at the start because you follow Horace over his entire life with all the ups and downs that entails, as he learns the ropes of the world like an inquisitive child would, and by the end of the game you truly feel like you were right there with him through an entire lifetime of victories and traumas
Maybe Celeste is selling the game's unique approach a bit short, its edge in this genre is that of employing lots of walking on ceilings and walls and spheres with your magical grandfatherly loafer shoes, which is always something that appeals to me, joining the small-but-honorable pantheon of such famous ceiling-walker platformers as Gravity Armor MetalStorm, VVVVVV, and of course Super Mario Galaxy, especially that game's 2D side-scrolling segments
It's also somewhat of a collectathon, with a big open-ended map focused around maximizing the fun factor of the main character's quest to cleanse the world by collecting one million pieces of junk (don't worry, there's not exactly one million item pickups)
Some people might think this game too difficult, with an obvious case of "the programmer mastered the game" difficulty, but games where you're not in a life-or-death struggle all the time bore me, so I really liked this game's difficulty curve

I think what makes this game work so much on me is the way nobody can accuse it of not swinging for the fences, it earns its characters, endears them to you despite the difficulty in taking seriously its Newgrounds-ass sprite comics-ass cutscenes and the monotone text-to-speech delivery
Everyone is given ample amounts of screentime and plenty of chronological years to grow over and when someone betrays you it genuinely hurts despite being understandable from their perspective

Some people (myself?) have interpreted the "critically mixed" (according to Normal People) film Bicentennial Man as being a trans and/or autistic analogy, whether or not that was the initial intention of the writer, and I think the same can be said for Horace
The both of them are about a character who is built different, singled-out for not looking and acting the same way as others, and an uphill decades-long battle to assert personhood in a normative society that keeps telling you you're not good enough to have that, in the process being very straightforward in how the titular android endures and is alienated by brutal systemic oppression from being part of a group that is legally designated to be less human than those making the rules

It's been a couple years since I played it (ignore where it says completed again, just wanted to leave a real review this time) otherwise I'd quote the game itself or something, but if you want a memorable existential treatise on how horrifying it would be to exist as an artificial humanoid who cannot die in a world suffused by the stench of your flesh-based loved ones' deaths, AND you want to humiliate Twin Galaxies former world record holder Billy Mitchell, then have I got the game for you

I think the biggest failing of this game and what really ground me down after playing it for a while was the constant dissonance between so many of the moving parts of this. The art style wants to go for a pixelated, simplistic look but also wants to have cutscenes displaying emotion through facial expressions that don't really translate through the design. Parts of this tonally feel like a cutesy English kid's storybook but when the darker elements are introduced they don't slot in naturally at all. The majority of this wants to be a precision platformer, but then streams of somewhat clunky minigames break up the natural flow of the game (all the transitions feeling very jarring & abrupt).

Now, part of my reason for dropping this might just be down to my own preferences & less so any inherent failings of the game itself. I'm definitely not one for nail-bitingly hard gameplay or precision platforming, but I was surprised with just how precise and unforgiving the majority of this game was. The lack of a life system is indicative of this, but this still felt off-puttingly punishing to a point where the lack of lives seems more like tape on the cracks than an intentional design choice. It's not a complete loss, as I do like the story, some of the charming visual design and the soundtrack, but all the endearing aspects were ground down by aggravating gameplay & a lack of skippable moments.

i started to question why i love art. i dont think i've played a worse video game.

An absolute hidden gem with lots of great difficulty, a charming story, and interesting mechanics. Maybe could have been a few hours shorter, but I can't bring myself to lower its score.

Sometimes after you've played a game for 5h you think "this has been fun, but it is time for it to end".
This game is like 145 hours (or feels like it)

Horace has a lot of heart but it should be a much shorter experience. There are new mechanics introduced at a decent pace but they are not enough to prevent the game from getting stale. I did find the game very funny at times.