Horace

War is bad and death is sad. I don't think people rip into the story enough. It's sci-fi shaped with nothing to say. This wouldn't matter if it was the usual brisk and lively fare but this is 10 minutes of slow cutscene of the "this is not qualified to tell me anything" variety per two screens of clumsy platforming. I didn't have much fun.

questo platform è veramente particolare. Ha una storia molto articolata e toccante e una marea di filmati , forse un po lenti e prolissi, ma piacevoli. Ha un sacco di citazioni dalla cultura pop anni 80-90. Come platform è discreto e ha una meccanica interessante di rotazione del mondo. Andando avanti diventa anche tosto ma i checkpoints sono cmq abbastanza ravvicinati. può cmq causare un pò di frustrazione , dipende dall'abilità del giocatore, e cmq se vi bloccate c'è un modo per attivare la console sviluppatore con i cheats. Le musiche sono composte da tracce di musica classica e altre originali, nel complesso davvero ben fatte. E' lungo, ci ho messo 15 ore e avrei gradito che fossero state 10, ma nel complesso l'ho adorato e mi lascerà dei bei ricordi.

Horace is simply outstanding. A love letter to both the 8 bit era and platform games in general. It's one of those games that is fun from the outset and incredibly addictive - a rare title where you are either playing it or thinking about when you'll be able to play it next. Although the gameplay is essentially a platform puzzle game (with the odd boss fight thrown in), it shows plenty of originality, with some really fiendish room designs to keep you on your toes. The main character, Horace, is highly agile and pleasingly easy to control. You will die lots - but it's always your fault, not that of the game. It can be frustrating at times, with lots of deaths in the same places, but patience and perseverance will see you progress Set against a surprisingly moving story with plenty of humour which will make you both laugh out loud and groan, this is a must-own title both for retro gaming fans and fans of platform games generally. It does lose a little focus in the middle (the endless trudging around the mansion - an obvious nod to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy) does become a little tedious, but that's really the only time the pacing sags. Once I bought it, Horace quickly established itself not just as one of my favourite games I've played this year, but one of my favourite games ever - and in a gaming "career" that stretches back to the early 80s, that's some feat!

Story is cringe, gameplay felt like a chore.

There is a lot going on in this game. It is a stunning achievement. It is also a mess. Horace is a very long game, probably too long and the solo developer issues show up a lot. I think they could have used someone to tell them to leave things out. It drives me absolutely crazy because some decisions are pretty amazing but then they are followed with something so bafflingly bad I question if I am still inhabiting a corporeal body on this earthly plane. This game could be close to a masterpiece if they had been less indulgent, but man he there are a lot of darlings that, I think, should have been knocked off. There is a lot of charm here. The platforming physics are pretty fun a lot of the time too. The story however is trying to do too much. The tone is very strange. It’s not funny when it tries to do jokes and that undercuts the moments when it tries to be earnest, I did find myself laughing out loud at times but because I found it’s direction confusing or uncomfortable. Horace feels like a watching a fireworks factory burn down. Someone made tons of mistakes but it’s also a spectacle and hopefully we will all learn something.

I got pretty bored within the first hour because the game design is pretty horrible. There's far too much backtracking, and levels often slow the gameplay down with things like NPC's that you need to carry making you unable to sprint. The introductory levels teach very little while taking a massive amount of time to run through. Movement and jumping feel fine, but considering how much padding there is it gets quite tedious. It simply has too much fluff. Even after you get the boots - which do give the player something interesting to do - it's still bogged down by unskippable cutscenes that accomplish nothing. I understand not wanting the player to skip the narrative in the narrative platformer, but the entire story is told through a voice-over narrative. There is no show, only tell. A text-to-speech robot explains the entire world to you, detail by excruciating detail. There are no voice actors. The plot is never progressed through gameplay. Do your linear objective -> explain the effect of that objective through an unskippable cutscene -> now here's the next thing -> repeat. Having the story glacially listed off to you by a literal TTS algorithm would be bad enough, but it's made far worse by the lackluster writing. Scenes are overexplained and some of them don't even need to exist. Taking the player out of the game to spend 10 seconds stating the obvious is bad for pacing. With all of that being said, it's abundantly clear that a massive amount of love went into this game. But would I recommend playing it? If you have a tremendous amount of patience (more than me), sure. Go for it. It has some really cool ideas, mechanically and narratively. Those good parts are trapped in a mountain of janky filler, but I'm willing to bet that this game was barely able to come out as-is. The story goes to some truly insane places, and after watching it online I think it's easy to see why it resonates with so many people. It's ambitious, to say the least. Many of the problems that I've pointed out could easily be attributed to a lacking budget. Since you ultimately want to ship your game above all else, you're not going to worry about making every single level air-tight. So what if there's some wasted space? Voice actors are expensive, animation is even more expensive, and the writer really wanted to make space for every single part of the story he had because he wanted to tell all of it. I can respect that. I'd give it a thumbs-down, but I'm just too charmed by how much passion they put into this.

Story-driven 2D platformer. Certainly charming in terms of story and presentation -- with bit-tune renditions of classical music abound -- but the gameplay itself is ultimately lacking and devolves all too often into frustrating platform challenges. 5/10