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.
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.