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Hohokum (PS3) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Monday 29 June, 2015 // I stopped playing this game on: Saturday 4 July, 2015
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
July 4, 2015 04:40:06 PM
I finished this the other day, less than 5 hrs of gameplay which is fine, and I'm still mulling over the experience. I really wanted to like this game - but I don't. And that feels odd to me. I really enjoyed how the game encourages exploration and whimsy. Sometimes it's just enjoyable to fly around the screen and bump into things to see how they react. Sometimes it's just really pretty and colorful. The game's creators have clearly gone out of their way to eliminate a lot of the "standard" game elements to (maybe?) return to a nostalgic notion of videogames as things where you had to explore and discover what to do. I think this is really neat, and perhaps what I enjoyed most about the game. However, a lot of that was overpowered by how lost and confused I felt in the grand scheme of things. In a nutshell, I REALLY wish I could tell that I was "done" with an area in terms of its main goal. I figured out kind of late that I was supposed to free/find a snake creature in each world but, since I played over the course of a few evenings, I'd keep on forgetting which areas I had "completed" and which ones I still have left to go. Yes, there's some signalling in the main/hub world (completed areas have a snake circling them) - but it took me a while to realize that (because the snakes will leave their circle to follow you, which makes them unreliable as a UI element for area "completion"). I thought this was a strange decision because when you press "Start" in any area you're sent to a menu where a creature (it varies) will show up and let you know how many "eyes" you haven't found and how many there are in total in the area you're currently on. An additional "snake? yes/no" would have REALLY made a difference for me. Huh. As I wrote the above I realized that it was just that little thing that soured a lot of the game experience for me (as I navigated back and from between areas trying to remember where I was at and what I had done already). I guess I'm getting a bit softer towards Hohokum too, it really is whimsical, pretty to look at, and enjoyable to control. So, that one "missing" UI thing....

Hohokum (PS3)