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.

This game has so much heart in it. There's a lot to be said about the difficulty and how it is a little brutal in that regard, however the additions of shields make the difficulty a lot more manageable.

This is a really truly clever platformer, with a really truly touching and funny story. I just don't know why there are some points of this game that feel almost too loved. There is a segment where you have to play a bunch of old retro games (not real retro games, but fun nods to them) and you have to do well with some of these games. My biggest frustration was being stuck on that.

It's a bit slow, a bit too long, but I don't regret playing it to completion.

I feel like this game was made specifically to cater to a certain era of gamers who grew up with games that are hard to maneuver, with janky controls because of hardware limitations. It serves to tickle their nostalgia while trying to have a good story. If you’re that kind of person, maybe a person who enjoyed games in the 70s or something? And a person who maybe lived in Europe? Maybe you’d like this game. But that’s not me, maybe that’s just the reason, that I’m not the audience for this game, but at the same time I came in at the very least for a story, and I come out of this experience mourning the loss of my time.

(full review here https://doorplays.substack.com/p/horace-review)

Complete playthrough. A well-made 2D platforming adventure following the 'life' of the titular sentient robot, Horace's highlight has to be its profound story, at turns touching. amusing and surreal. While platforming is the primary gameplay mechanic, often built around a gravity-manipulation mechanic and eventually becoming 'Metroidvania'-like with collectible upgrades and hidden secrets, occasional minigames and other side activities mix it up, often to good effect.

However, what drags the game down significantly is an absolutely punishing level of difficulty, which doesn't feel well-placed here and is especially frustrating when combined with the free-form exploration of some of the game's later chapters - it's simply not fun to navigate through difficult challenges repeatedly upon finding that a given direction isn't fruitful at the time. The game's story justifies its length, stretching across 22 chapters that will likely take somewhere in the region of 10-15 hours to play through, but in gameplay terms I'd gladly have seen it cut down to half that.

As I'm sure quite a few people did, I got this in a recent eShop sale for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. What a weird, special game this is. The tone is very British and there's a ton of pop culture references throughout. It has flaws, but its charm makes up for it and there's clearly a lot of love that went into making this. The story was oddly engaging in a way and I loved seeing it unfold, but some parts (I never skipped cutscenes) just went on for too long. Overall it was fun to play and nothing was overly difficult at all. When I started this I never thought it would take me around 17 hours to reach the credits.

Horace is an interesting action platformer. A robot begins to settle into his life with a family and their employees but shuts down after the death of the old man that he was closest to. He awakens years after everyone has left and a large scale war has come and gone causing you to attempt to find them again, as well as his place in the world. You proceed to become involved in robberies, jail breaks, time travel, celebrity kidnapping, an Alice in Wonderland area, dish washing and brick making jobs, drumming hero minigames, basketball, space travel, hanging out with a guy that tells you of deserting the military when ordered to kill civilians but seems to love snapping the necks of random security guards, etc all with frequent dialogue, stage, or music remixes that reference classic games, movies, and TV which are three of the things the robot loves the most.

The game is mostly a platformer that has you making use of magnetic boots to climb up walls or stick to the ceiling but it includes a lot of varied stages and gameplay elements. One section might have you hiding in bushes and lockers to avoid searchlights, one part might have you growing to different sizes, elevator rides with a lot of rotating traps might be in one area, another area might be full of timed lasers to avoid. Many areas have bosses which are often large opponents you have to defeat by hitting or breaking off certain parts of them and the majority of areas have trash to pick up with a side goal being to clean 1,000,000 things as your creator had told you to do before his death.

There is about four hours of cutscenes and both that and the animations have a lot of nice little details with frequent funny moments thrown in giving a bit more life to the characters, though it comes with a lot of darker moments as alluded to above. The large number of minigames mostly range from passable to actually being pretty good with you never really being forced to play any you wouldn't like for long, and some you don't need to try at all. There is typically nothing too interesting about the actual platforming mechanics and your character doesn't always control perfectly but the way the stages and locations change things up helps to keep things interesting. Though if you are looking for a platformer that mostly focuses on the action this will be a game where you find yourself constantly losing your rhythm as both short and long story segments will frequently be playing out. There is also nothing particularly fun about trying to reach your goal of trash cleaning and collecting.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1201026706431037442?s=20

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

An adorable, flagrantly British adventure that is always barraging you with an endless stream of hilarious and tragic new scenarios and setpieces, each wildly different from the last in setting and tone, all while excelling in everything for just about the entire experience. The story is playful and silly while also deeply tragic and emotional, and is one of my favorites to come from gaming in a while. The gameplay is no slouch, either, as it's chock full of brilliantly designed puzzle platforming scenarios while always keeping things fresh. I mean, hell, the last 3rd of the game just goes full-on Metroidvania after 15 hours of a more traditional linear adventure platformer.

It has some issues, the aforementioned Metroidvania section can grow tiresome after a while and it is lacking some polish, but otherwise, this is a criminally underrated game that everyone should play. This is like Undertale levels of good.

Es un juego de plataformas que sinceramente creo que a más avanza, menos me gusta. Al principio me parecía un juego interesante, con una historia típica pero curiosa y un control más o menos agradable para lo que te proponía. Luego meten los cambios de gravedad y marea mucho, pero bueno, te acostumbras y te proponen puzzles interesantes. Luego te meten enemigos a esquivar y bueno, a veces sirven como puzzles. Luego unos láseres y pinchos para los que el control no funciona. Luego enemigos que van a por ti sin poder hacer nada. Luego contrarrelojs, y ya cuándo lo he dejado ha sido cerca del final cuando por fin te permiten nadar. Mira, no. Paso. Y el juego en si mal no está, pero te empiezan a meter cosas como si eso lo hiciese mejor y no, a partir de la mitad todo lo que meten es para peor. Por no hablar de las fases de sigilo, que es para echarlas de comer aparte.

Muchas veces la música con remix de música clásica, pero incluso cuándo es suya, se hace repetitiva y pesada. El que el robot diga todas y cada una de las conversaciones lo entiendo narrativamente, pero cansa muchísimo. Al principio hay numerosas "cinemáticas" donde no puedes hacer nada, saltando cada 3 pasos como si fuese un Metal Gear pero sin esa calidad de dirección.

No creo que sea un juego horrible, pero si que se han venido arriba y no han estado a la altura. Una pena.

Horace has lovely visuals, a good blend of classical and digital soundtrack, and a fairly good concept for a story. But it lacks that indescribable essence that's behind all good games, the "game feel".

Horace doesn't value your time. At least 50% of the game is unskippable cutscenes. Not a single cutscene is skippable. Horace's voice, which is a synthetic, unchanging voice used for every voice in the game, is cute and humorous only for the briefest of moments, before you realize that you are going to be hearing the exact same tones in different combinations for the next significant portion of your life. He commentates over every cutscene, speaking in quote format for other characters, and speaks quite a lot outside of cutscenes as well. I never want to hear this golden sod speak again.

The story seems to take some interesting twists in the time that I played, (up to chapter 8 out of 22) but it's such a slog to get through each chapter. Gameplay seems to be slotted in whenever the developer wanted, with dream sequences that don't advance the story taking up whole chapters appearing from nowhere and scarcely being mentioned again.
Overall, Horace's individual components are great, better than passing. But some very big issues crop up in the design of the game that really just make it not fun to play.

I really liked the platforming and there was a lot of creative stuff throughout, but didn't vibe with the story going all over the place and changing everything constantly. Some areas like the multiple stealth sections and a couple bosses were really unfun, especially the bosses since they're the only parts in the game that don't give you pity shields after dying enough, and the final boss in particular is actually one of the worst controlling things I've ever played. Overall though, still a unique experience I'd recommend checking out if you have it.

I gave this game an honest try but I really can't do this anymore. Every level is just monkey in the cage platforming (no tech skill or special movement required, you're just jumping and running around usually with maybe some gravity flipping) where you have to dodge a million obstacles, and they all can easily kill you in one shot. Sure, you could equip temporary shields, but that doesn't fix the problem that there aren't enough temporary shields and that there aren't enough checkpoints, so you're constantly redoing sections of the level for long durations at a time and it feels like you're barely making any visible progress. The boss battles feel the exact same way, where you're just fighting them for half of your life because phases require multiple hits and if you die (from a single hit), that's the entire phase that you'll have to redo. To top it all off, the soundtrack is just generally chiptune classical music (which is pleasant at first, but just loops really quickly and gets really monotonous) and cutscenes are extremely long with robot text to speech narration and extremely zoomed into the pixel aesthetics so everything looks pretty ugly. I finally threw in the towel during the brickbreaker boss, which attacked me with pinecones that split into small projectiles going through my barrier while i had to reflect back tons of actual useable projectiles to both injure the boss and make sure my bridge didn't collapse after being hit with 3 projectiles. And then I saw the bricks respawn after 30 seconds and I couldn't take it anymore. How does a game that has so many interesting ideas with different gameplay and environments end up being such a slog?