The cutscene that plays when using the dynamite on a battle is the single best thing ever implemented in any videogame in all of human history and I’m only mildly exaggerating.

A macabre festival where the dance never ends, a fever dream made out of bones and clay; Hylics manages to perfectly capture the feeling of a nightmare that seems to be completely absurd, yet it manages to craft meaning within the spiral of chaos. Places with random names located in islands that make no sense; mazes and entire worlds inside machines down ladders that somehow connect, and half of the odd weirdos you come across seem to speak in riddles and the other half take the insanity of this realm as another Tuesday, but all share the incredibly exaggerated animations, that range from the smoothest hand and clay movement you could think of in battles to just three frames for each walk cycle, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If Hylics delivers something in spades, it’s definitively a sense of style, of harsh clay figurines and contrasting colors, of poems and jokes, with mountaintops populated by cone-shaped cultists and an afterlife full of fishes and a couch. I could list every single area and enemy in this game and say, ‘’WoAH! That was pretty weird and cool!’’, but I think the fact the game is just that, an avalanche of nonsense and weird shapes—and somehow finds a way to make an actually pretty simple tale and a world that has some sort of meaning and makes sense—is far more impressive than the weird moments themselves.

The harsh and quiet melodies, the special moves you get by watching the TVs, the pals you meet along the way; it’s really hard to talk about individual aspects of Hylics because everything seems intrinsically connected with each other and totally unique at the same time, which ironically makes it so some of the moments that stand out like a sore thumb are those in which it feels like the game doesn’t go nuts enough with its ideas.

The combat system, as crazy as some of the attacks get, is still pretty light; there are some cool things about it, like how it connects to the afterlife, some item interactions, and how the game’s own openness makes meeting allies and gaining abilities completely up to you. But I think that’s where the interest peaks, in how the combat is pretty determined by what you do outside of it, and when it comes to battles themselves, while there are some interesting bosses, it soon became pretty clear others are just damage sponges and that you can become pretty powerful very easily, and that plus how the areas are designed often makes combat seem more like a chore you sometimes do to get past a certain point or gain meat and money, and that otherwise evading conflict is often the faster, less annoying option.

And again, it’s in these battles where some of the more abstract and impressive animations can be found, and if anything, the final area and boss fight will ask of you to have gotten many special secret moves and quite the amount of bucks, so it isn’t completely valueless to engage in combat, but in a game with such a crazy atmosphere and universe, I was hoping for something far more engaging.

I was hoping to see more of the party members, who seem to lose their mouths the moment they join you. I was hoping for some of the puzzles to be more out there. I was hoping for more of its insane style to slip into other areas, like the menus or the secrets… Hylics presents an impossibly creative world, and even if it doesn’t last longer than it needs to and it's full of amazing stuff, it feels as if its full potential has yet to be achieved.

But what was accomplished is unforgettable; despite wishing I got to see more of their personalities, the yellow devil and his three friends singing and playing in a bar in the middle of nowhere and plowing through the forces of the moon before facing the final fiend are some amazing moments that made me laugh despite no words being said. Wade is a menace, but not one that has to be locked up; in fact, it should be let out even more wild. Godspeed, you crazy bastard…

Also, big fan of Somsnosa, it’s always nice to see another hat with horns appreciator…

First gave this a whirl in January or so, but because I am stupid I didn't know the game was not autosaving so I just lost all my progress on reopening it. It's a short ass game, so getting back there was like really easy when I actually decided to, but for a while I didn't really have the motivation.

Hylics is incredibly easy, which I definitely welcome with open arms after playing a slew of much harder older games, but it also feels kind of barebones in the gameplay department as well. It has hardly any real story or unique mechanics, but it's also like only 2-3 hours long so I suppose that never really starts grating on you.

The real star of the show here is the presentation, which is completely insane. All throughout it has a surreal, feverish, maybe even sickly feel to it. It walks the line between relaxing and depressing. Every enemy and NPC looks deeply uncanny, the music is half-awake, and a lot of objects and enemies just melt into goo when you interact with them. It's incredibly strange, it kind of carries this game to the moon and back, and I don't think I've seen anything like it really.

I think this is worth a purchase. It's a very short experience, but an even more intriguing one, and I can see it lingering in my head for a solid while. Would definitely recommend if you're looking for something more laid back.

It's less polished and less fleshed out than Hylics 2, yes. But for how much I'd heard this described as a quirky little oddity or throwaway prankster experiment in comparison to its sequel, I was surprised at just how rich and enjoyable a gaming experience it wound up being.

It does, however, lean much further into being a parody of the JRPG genre (while at the same time toying with the genre's mechanics in genuinely interesting and creative ways). Lindroth seems to take a sort of impish, anarchic glee in "breaking" the genre's fundamental systems or rendering them pointless and absurd.

Near the end of the game, for instance, you walk into a room, open some chests, and are suddenly given what for all intents and purposes amounts to an infinite amount of money — a completely random, unearned, hilariously disproportionate "reward" for doing basically nothing at all. The game's biggest laugh-out-loud moment for me occurs when you defeat the final boss, upon which you're again given "999999 BUCKS" (which you now have no reason to spend), as well as "A HOT DOG," and are informed that you've gained "999999 EXP" and that all of your party members have now reached "LEVEL 63." Neither experience nor levels have been mentioned at all in the game prior to this moment.

The implicit message seems to be: none of this matters! You didn't play this game because you want to crunch numbers¹ or to fight repetitive battles until your avatar is as souped up and powerful as possible. You played it so that you could have the experience of being a weird little yellow guy with a moon for a head, wandering around a dithered 8-bit clay world, squashing vegetables, petting cats, watching trippy animations, and listening to NPCs with goofy walk cycles recite gobbledygook flavor text. And on that front? Hylics delivers.

I can't wait for Hylics 3.


¹For an example of weird JRPG parody that goes the opposite direction and leans waaaaay into the number crunching, check out the games of Damien Crawford!

Hylics is art.

On a critical analysis, Hylics has a few flaws. An average playtime of about 4 hours and most of the text being handled by a random word generator leaves Hylics with almost no narrative, and the combat is standard RPGMaker fare.

But even these faults are underscored with the beauty in Hylics, and there's more than enough for anyone to look past them. Most if not all of the randomly generated words are incredibly verbose, leading to perplex and nonsensical sentences that perfectly match the surreal visuals of pixel art combined with digitized clay sculptures and the odd, yet charming music that perfectly captures the hazy and dreamlike feel of the game. Each move is learned from a television and, along with every item, has a unique animation when used. Player moves feature a pair of hands coming on screen and gesturing to consume vegetables or send space shurikens at enemies. (Or, in dynamite's case, absent of hands but featuring footage of a house suffering an atomic blast. Really.)

Artist Mason Lindroth's incredible claymation makes fantastic visuals for a game. At every turn, Hylics is a surrealist art masterpiece that anyone with $2.99 and a free afternoon can and should bask in.

One of those games that sneaks up on you with how completely and totally awesome it is. It throws out any need for meaning or an explanation outside of a very basic RPG story, opting instead to just be weird and cool. The bizarre claymation look, randomly generated text, and Radiohead-lite soundtrack make for the perfect "vibe" game. It's full of things that are there just because they're kind of neat. Toilet burritos and cartoon violence are treated with equal care. Sometimes it will just overcrowd you with enemies so you can get the satisfaction of turning them into an indistinguishable blob. There's just so much game in this game, you know? One of my unironic favorite things about this experience was going onto the creator's Twitter and learning that he really loves sandcastles. Duh. Of course he does. You can see that in every inch of the game, as well as a deep love for claymation. It's infectious.

"Thine behaviour's skeleton can mercifully exalt and radiance sort of caress a product!!"

I don't know what I played here, nor do I know how to write about it. What I do know is I enjoyed this imaginative surreal pastel coloured claymation RPG a lot. It's also much cheaper than doing drugs.

Recommended.

The indie games industry is, for the most part, devoid of skillful originality. Logically this seems false, as indie games have developed somewhat of an anti-AAA, counterculture stance of development, but that stance does not reflect an indication of skillful originality. If I had a dollar ever time I saw some indie developer claim they were reinventing the way that stories were told in games, and then ended up just making another first-person story-focused walking simulator, I could personally fund one of those games on Kickstarter. I have been lucky enough to play a few genuinely mechanically innovative or original indie games—Obra Dinn for its deduction-bending pocketwatch, or Gunpoint for its snappy mix of stealth and puzzle-solving—but I tend to find that games are at their best when they relish in their inspirations’ foundations, and seek out originality in other avenues. Undertale fleshes out a simple JRPG lookalike with a colorful and emotionally involved story; Stardew Valley uses its luscious palette and soundtrack to draw the player into its Harvest Moon-inspired world; and Celeste combines nailbiting difficulty with tight controls to make one of the best platformers of all time.

Hylics, from a foundational perspective, is pretty ordinary. It plays out like a very short, shrunken JRPG, as you build out a party of four members, gain money from combat to dress them up with hot gear, and learn new spells and moves to fight enemies. Outside of this gameplay foundation, however, Hylics has some of the most unique direction I’ve ever seen. Lindroth’s art is the result of an ayahuasca-induced orgy between Gaudi, Geiger, and Cronenberg, with grotesque and pungent portraits of oil and clay composing an abstract and arid world. Expressionist, polygonal shapes and structures pierce through the epidermis of this utterly strange and esoteric world; whilst randomly generated text produces order from chaos, strangeness from normalcy, madness from truth. In this manner it produced an emotion that I previously thought to be precluded in games—that of utter strangeness and discovery. It is, in this manner, a production of hinged unhingedness, pieced together from the digested scraps of autophiliac artistry.

Rapaz, que experiência excêntrica incrível esse jogo é.

Jogar Hylics é se entregar a um oceano de confusão enquanto caça migalhas de sentido que te ajudam a seguir em frente através de um mundo onde tudo é absurdamente surreal e com um estilo visual totalmente único.
É SIMPLESMENTE FANTÁSTICO!

Fico triste por não ter me afundado tanto num jogo como Hylics. É um jogo que, a primeira vista, era extremamente interessante e também muito diferente das coisas que eu joguei ou jogava no mês em que decidi tocar em Hylics. O problema do jogo para mim foi que eu fiquei bastante confuso com todo o mundo do próprio jogo. Sem dúvidas o próprio é lindo e interessante, mas eu me sentia jogado aleatoriamente e mal sabia onde eu deveria ir primeiro. Quanto mais andava, mais maravilhado eu estava com a arte do jogo, mas em troca mais frustrado eu estava por não entender se o jogo queria que eu visse um experimento de arte, ou fizesse alguma coisa com história. Talvez o segundo jogo clique mais comigo, porque o primeiro foi bem frustrante e confuso. Entretanto, sua arte ainda é incrível, então dou meus aplausos por isto.