#hasbeenheroes

When the tranquillity of Haven Tor is interrupted by a mysterious interloper only the unlikeliest of heroes can save the day! Meet Noodle the Snake and his hyperactive best friend, Doodle the Hummingbird, who together must reunite the missing Keystones with the magical gates that give Haven Tor its mythical power. A unique, physics-based puzzle platform game, Snake Pass challenges players to ‘think like a snake’ as they tackle precarious puzzles as only a snake can. Slither through long grass, coil around bamboo and climb out of trouble in the latest game from award-winning independent studio Sumo Digital!

Okay, a puzzle-y adventure! I’m up for one of those! Check that description out, right? Noodle the Snake, Doodle the Hummingbird, Haven Tor, a mysterious interloper! This is going to be cool, I can’t wait to get into it!

But as the game went on I began to notice something: I had assumed wrong, this wasn’t an adventure, this was just a puzzle game! The levels are just puzzles. Sure, there are primary and optional objectives of the puzzles, but you really can’t stray far from the path. The characters, Noodle and Doodle, are meaningless. Noodle, the snake, is how the player interacts with the world. Doodle, the hummingbird, is a living tutorial. Just the tools given to the player to solve the puzzle. A deadness behind the veneer.

And it continues: The story, the characters, the level design, the graphics, the music; there isn’t any soul behind any of it. It all works fine, but nothing more; which leaves me with a really weird feeling. Am I playing some elaborate tech demo? The lack of any soul makes the entirety of Snake Pass feel like an afterthought. A game engine demo, and nothing more.

Has-Been Heroes is a challenging, lane-based roguelike game of strategy and action, featuring a band of heroes on a quest to escort the King’s twin princesses to school!

Players control three characters during the journey and must focus on coordinating melee attacks, managing cooldowns and combining hundreds of different spells to create devastating combo effects, all in order to defeat an endless army of undead, summoned in their path by the Great Ghoul!

The rewarding strategy game features irreverent humor, expanding world maps and increasing levels of difficulty, compounded by the specter of permadeath. The massive quantity and randomness of spells and items, as well as additional unlockable heroes allow for thousands of new experiences, forcing players to change their playstyle each time they start a new game.

Ahh, alright! A humorous roguelike about escorting a king’s daughters to school. I love roguelikes, so I’m all ready for this one. I already knew the deal: I was going to die in some funny ways, but those runs would at least allow me to learn the ropes and maybe unlock some helpful items, right? It should be fun.

Actually playing the game felt like getting a tooth drilled out. None of the “jokes” are actually funny, the game balance is all over the place, and losing a run made me feel like deleting the game. Frustrating? That’s putting it lightly. The game is so close to a revelation, though. With a few tweaks it could be an amazing game, but that just makes it’s current state even more unfortunate. A soulless skeleton of a game that could potentially be something much better.

And I mean that genuinely. Some changes to the way the game is balanced would help a lot! But can you add a soul post release? Sure, it’s possible to change some of the writing — the jokes in particular — but can you add more than that? Can you add an emulsifier to make it all work together?