The flow of Henry Hatsworth

This weekend I finally got to borrow a copy of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, a game designed by Kyle Gray, an ETC alum, when he was still working at EA.

I had the pleasure to meet Kyle last year at the ETC when he came and gave us a very good talk on how he successfully pitched Henry Hatsworth to the EA higher-ups and got it green-lit. Right then I made a mental note that I should play this game as soon as it came out, and it wasn’t until now that I actually got the chance.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is, as the title cleverly points put, a puzzle-adventure game: think Bejeweled meets Super Mario Bros. Since the game is made for the DS, it’s very convenient to have the Sidescroller Platformer on the top screen and on the bottom one the Puzzle, where the stylus is most helpful.

The two screens are fundamentally connected, since enemies defeated in the Sidescroller have an effect on the Puzzle and, at the same time, doing well in the Puzzle gives the character bonuses in the Sidescroller. There is a lot going on and, even if only one screen is ever active at the same time, it’s easy to see why they did not opt for simultaneous gameplay a la The World Ends With You.

When I first heard of this concept I found it extremely fascinating, especially since I got to peek at the theming of the game and found it to be very light-hearted and humorously charming. However, I was somewhat disappointed when I got my hands on the game and realized I was not enjoying it that much. After some two or three hours with the game I have pinpointed that it feels more like two games in one and less like there’s true synergy between the game modes. I usually end up playing the top screen until it becomes necessary that I play the bottom one at which point I switch until I can no longer do anything in the bottom, so I go back to the top. I find that this does not help my flow much, since it feels more like a directed experience than a spontaneous one.

It is definitely not all bad, and there are times where I find it strategically useful to switch between screens on the fly. But the truth is that I usually switch when the game prompts me, be it because I have close to no life left or because my bottom screen is getting full with monsters. My biggest issue with the game isn’t this, though, because I usually do not mind the pacing at which I need to switch screens. The problem is that for a game that relies so much on alerting players to switch screens, this game is really bad at alerts.

Let’s go back to Zelda for a minute - even the original Legend of Zelda will do. Thanks to games like that we have learned to become reckless with our life points until the game alerts us that we are running low. We as players have become accustomed to games watching out for us, flashing the screen or making obnoxious sounds when we are about to die. In Henry Hatsworth the alert happens midway through the life energy, when Henry loses some of his power and undergoes a visible mode change. But when he is down to one heart or less, when we really need to go down to Puzzle mode to help save him, the game fails to alerts us. And if it does alert me then I have completely failed to notice, which goes to say that a much much better job could be done. Other alerts in the game, such as when monsters start creeping into the top screen from the bottom, are also ineffective.

This simple flaw has made me replay countless levels countless times already, and probably will make me replay more still. In a game where so much is going on and the player must keep an eye on so many elements, it is truly a shame that the most important of those elements, the one that can actually kill you, is not given enough importance. Henry Hatsworth is a very clever and well-crafted game full of interesting mechanics, but it’s also full of flow-braking details.