Where Happy Game shines is its beautiful hand drawn artwork and environments, a signature feature of any Amanita game.
#Happy game gameplay series
A few too many of them are quite literally just performing the same action or series of actions over and over again until the game finally moves forward with the scene, and somebody looking for more complicated problem-solving than that likely won’t find what they’re looking for here.
Much like the gameplay these puzzles are very straightforward, sometimes to its detriment. It’s more akin to a series of vignettes in which the player must solve a self-contained puzzle that can range from feeding rabbits carrots so that they get fat and distract a much larger cannibalistic rabbit to something as simple as figuring out a way to interact with a certain object until something happens. You will not find either of those in Happy Game. Veterans of the adventure game genre or even players of previous Amanita titles may expect an exploration aspect where you are collecting items in order to use them elsewhere to solve those puzzles. At the end of the day this game was very clearly designed with a mouse in mind, and the move to an analog stick just doesn’t work as well.Īs said before, gameplay in Happy Game is very simple even down to the puzzles. The cursor does snap to interactable objects when it comes near, but this gets iffy when you’re hovering around more than one interactable object at once. This is unfortunately where Switch becomes the not-ideal platform for Happy Game, as controlling the cursor with the stick is sensitive and clumsy. Gameplay is very simple: the left stick moves the cursor, the right stick moves the child, pressing A allows you to grab and interact with an object with the cursor. This is no easy task, as the horrible monsters manifested by the smiley face would love nothing more than to lead the child into a gruesome death, whether that means devouring them, ripping them apart, or any number of horrifying fates.
In each of the game’s three acts you must help the child get back one of the things in their life that make them happy: a ball, a stuffed rabbit, and a puppy. In Happy Game you play as a child who has been trapped in a nightmare by a terrifying ghost-like creature that manifests as a giant smiley face. A game who’s opening warning screen makes sure to immediately tell you that, despite what the title says, it is not in any way a happy game. That is until Happy Game, Amanita’s most recent release. Their bread and butter is surreal, hand drawn imagery, but as far as I know they have never gone in the direction of taking their content into the realm of horror. Likewise, Amanita Design is not a new player in the adventure game scene, with a pedigree of releasing games like the Samorost trilogy, Machinarium, and Botanicula. The concept of taking something that is meant to be cute and heartwarming and twisting it into something disturbing and downright messed up is not exactly new we’ve seen it dozens of times with properties like Alice in Wonderland for example.
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