A 2 Steam

Hack 'n Slash

When I first heard about Hack 'n Slash the concept sounded great - a Zelda style adventure game but you have the ability to "hack" the world and manipulate it. Brilliant! Right?

Unfortunately not. 

Or at least not all the way through. Hack 'n Slash feels like half of a game, like a first draft - unrefined but a good base to work from - but they didn't fill it up. I don't mean the game is incomplete or broken - what is there has all the polish of a studio funded commercial project - but it's not enough. I don't know if they ran out of time or money or this was really their final vision but it just doesn't come together. 

In Hack 'n Slash you are young girl, who with the help of a floating sprite and a broken sword that has a USB stick inside, adventures your way through various locals and solves puzzles. The sword allows you to hack anything with a USB port in it and change the properties of the in world object. You can change enemies to allies, turn things off or on, speed things up, slow them down, push/pull otherwise immovable objects, etc. In principle it's a great idea, but in practice it's far more restrictive than fun. Most things only have 1 (maybe 2) properties worth changing, the rest are meaningless. You are not given a much in the way of creativity to exploit the concept of hacking stuff - their isn't much difference between hitting and killing a monster with a sword and hitting a monster with a sword to hack it to be non-aggressive. The end result is the same. I guess it's a good way to show violence isn't always the answer.

The meat of the game is the puzzles. Each of the locations is broken down into a number of smaller puzzles that lead to a larger puzzle that when solved allows you to move on to the next location (and story chapter). For me this was where the game really fell down, which being most of the game impacted my enjoyment greatly. Most of the smaller puzzles are some sort of Sokoban style endeavor - which on its face is fine - but then because of the hacking it fails to commit. Too often there is either only 1 solution (and it's obvious immediately) or about half way through you can just hack your way out and fudge the solution. Maybe this is the intent? Breaking the game is some sort of metaphor?

As the game goes on the larger harder puzzles feature a lot more code based manipulation rather than just changing a few properties or an object. You dive into the code of traps and rooms to figure out the solutions to the puzzles. The code is set up in a interesting and somewhat logical way...sort of. Not enough instruction or clear enough directions lead to a lot of just trying to figure out what key words relate to each other and if or how they can be changed. Many times you are asked to change the number value of a string, but clues to the number range from obscure to non-existent. Far too often I felt I was forced to decipher the code by guessing what the designer was thinking rather than using what information was presented. It reminded me a lot of old point-and-click adventure games and their obtuse puzzle solutions.

Now I will say up front that I am not a programmer, and only have rudimentary knowledge of how coding works beyond the surface. So that may have impacted my ability to understand what was presented, but most people would fall into that category and even just sprucing up the way the code language was presented into more layman terms could have gone a long way to remove a lot of the random guess I had to make. Most of the puzzles have a single solution and miles of red herrings or useless information to sift through.

And guessing was dangerous. In Hack 'n Slash changing the wrong variable could cause the bit of code you were manipulating to crash, at which point the world implodes and you have to start the puzzle/room again. This is the point where the game completely failed for me. Having to go back and remember (I started taking notes) of every change and variable in a puzzle could take ages, when you mess up a number near the end. At that point it's not fun or challenging (like most games are when you die and have to repeat a level) - it is tedium. In the end that is how I found most of Hack 'n Slash to be - tedious.

Speaking of tedious the dialog and attempts at humor in Hack 'n Slash are rough. Character conversations go on far to long and are usually not engaging or contain interesting information. Also they are mostly unskippable - which is AWESOME when you have to repeat them due to accidentally crashing the game through one of the puzzles. Weeee! Bleah. The jokes are not good. They even went for more corny humor, of which I am often a fan, but they fall flat. Combined with the thinnest of plot and story for an adventure game that I've ever seen, there was next to nothing to keep me engaged.

I did like the art style. It's minimalist and pretty, making me think of a 2D Zelda Windwaker. Somewhere between sketched and hand painted the world and characters are clear and defined. Great variety of color make the locations (while often content bare) pop visually. 

The best ideas in Hack 'n Slash went into the various item you pickup throughout the game. Each of these objects allows you to further affect the world in a really great way, giving you the ability to tackle puzzles by working "outside the box" the initially restrict you to. They give you the ability to slow down or speed up world time, or see the object names and code around you or even make wishes (allowing you to remotely change a variable in the overall game). Really brilliant stuff with massive potential! Very similar to (again) how new items let you make progress in Zelda games. Unfortunately it's wasted potential.

Other than 3-4 items the remainder of the 20 or so they give you have no purpose outside of the single puzzle they lead up to. They are one-and-done. Rather than being a new tool in your inventory to deal with the obstacles ahead they are forgotten brilliance. It's a real shame. Many of the items could have had an entire game based around them, instead they are throwaway. 

I finished Hack 'n Slash but towards the later game I generously used walkthroughs for anything overly obtuse as many of the end game puzzles just do not respect your time as as player. 

Double Fine has produced a number of great games over the years, but this is not one of them. It's not bad game, just one full of discarded potential.