Hiveswap: Act 1

Developer: What Pumpkin Games Inc
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Unknown (Act 1) & Playable (Act 2)
Rrp: £5.59 (Gog.com and Steam), £6.11 (Humblebundle)

This game is set in the Homestuck universe but apparently before the events of… well Homestuck. Those words mean very little to me, I’ve heard of Homestuck and that it was a thing for a while. I have no idea if it’s still popular or basically anything about it, so I’m very glad that they didn’t make knowing about it important otherwise I’d be totally lost.

The game is a point and click adventure game. One with a lot of 90’s references, but then it is set in the 90’s so that makes sense. As is the case with most point and click adventures its pretty short once you know what you’re doing, although I have to say this one felt shorter than most. Part of me wonders if the reason its so short is because it’s hand animated, I could certainly understand how that would factor into the decision to make a few of shorter games rather than one big one (since this the first of from what I’ve read four acts).

I have to say I rather enjoyed my time with the game, the puzzles were fun without being all that taxing and the writing was quite sharp, hell in some places it was even heartfelt. I especially liked the ‘strife’ puzzles which were puzzles where you were trying to evade a creature by utilising your inventory and the world around you.

Hiveswap: Act 2

Originally I was going to review this as a seperate title but… well as much as I love the Point and Click genre there isn’t really all that much that changes from game to game really, at least not within the same series usually. As such I thought why not just combine the pair?
Anyway, this is the second act in what apparently is going to be a four act series. I couldn’t find any word on the status of the next game but since there was a space of three years between the first game and this one I’m assuming that the developers are still working on it. Though I do have some doubts that it’ll come about given that the developers have announced that the person who owns the Homestuck IP has decided to leave and work on projects unrelated to Homestuck.

Enough on the drama and what not, what of the game itself? Well… it’s not bad actually, more of the same. So if you like solving puzzles and seeing characters develop then you might just enjoy this. It’s about twice as long as the last game so the increase in price is somewhat justified.

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