If you've played a hundred JRPGs before, you probably have your favorite parts and the parts you slog through because you know they're expected for the genre. Where "Kaeru no Tame no Kane no Waru" famously dispenses with the battling mechanic so as not to interrupt from the story, Hylics elides story, dialogue, and mechanical complexity for pure aesthetic.

And wow is that aesthetic fully realized. The world you traverse in this game is lovingly rendered through claymation converted to dithered pixel art. The effect is surreal and mesmerizing- just wandering around the maps is most of the fun of the game. The map is alien structures and forms replete with weird pinches and pumps and scoring marks. The characters move with such style. The battle animations are beautiful abstract castings and shape and movement. Is it style over substance though? Not entirely. The absence of a guiding story (in tension with the framing device of theatrical acts), gibberish dialogue, and simple, cliché RPG mechanics reinforce one another and the aesthetics. Instead of levelling, you are able to grind "meat" to gain more HP ("flesh"), but only when you die. This encourages a fast-and-loose play style, and compounds with the fact that enemies are finite, and their corpses litter the map wherever you have been. There are frequent structures- trees, shrubberies, buttons, switches, trash cans, that merely get squished like clay when you interact with them, and remain as clay smooshes for the rest of the game. The overwhelming action of the game is thus destruction- a tactile smooshing-up of the world around you. I was reminded of both OFF and Undertale, which both play with the idea of what it means to roleplay as a killer coldly "grinding" through the world. Hylics though is less interested in overtly moralizing about this action, but rather aestheticizing it in a tactile way. It doesn't matter why you are smooshing it all up, what story is compelling you forward- you are smooshing it all up because it is there, and your hands can smoosh.