Vibrant, neon colours produce a sickly-sweet shiny veneer that contrasts wonderfully with the disturbing imagery. The art style does a lot of the heavy lifting to bring the Burtonesque (although you could just as easily call it Amanita’s ‘house-style’ at this point) world to life. It’s a well-trodden trope but it definitely doesn’t make for a trite experience in Happy Game due to Amanita Design’s boundless creativity and ability to depict unique, nightmare-inducing monsters that relentlessly terrorise the young boy. Happy Game plays on the notion that childhood is traumatic it’s only due to constant coddling and pure naivety that we are oblivious to the terrors and strife of human life. Whilst there is certainly joy to be had in solving puzzles, most of the entertainment when playing Happy Game comes from seeing what the notoriously quirky minds of Amanita Design have concocted in the game’s thirty-or-so seamlessly connected and increasingly horrifying vignettes. Most of the puzzles are (literal) child’s play but there were one or two that were abstract enough to cause a few head-scratching moments. Instead, Happy Game, like many of Czech developer Amanita Design’s other games such as Chuchel and Samorost, fosters a more experimental and trial-and-error approach to gameplay encouraging the player to poke and prod (and sometimes stretch, mutilate and eviscerate) on-screen characters and items in order to see what reacts and what doesn’t with no written dialogue or instruction. There is no inventory, combining of items or dialogue trees as is typical for the genre. Happy Game plays like any point and click adventure using the mouse cursor to move your character an infantile boy of toddler age around various 2D environments that are the psychedelic manifestations of his nightmares in the hope of finding and rescuing several of his favourite toys. Bunnies being decapitated, little ant-like mites being impaled on a skewer, heart-shaped characters being goaded and prodded until they explode in a bloody fountain. It’s a warning to prospective players that despite its name and seemingly pleasant veneer, Happy Game is more akin to a horror experience and probably isn’t the ideal title to sit your five-year-old niece or nephew in front of as their first foray into the point and click genre. It exists, it’s something you can experience and then you can move on with your life with all these images in your subconscious just waiting to jump out when you least want them to.Happy Game opens with a message that it is, in fact, not a happy game. Although I think “enjoy” is the wrong way to look at game like this. Of course I know the question you’re wanting to ask: is it fun? Oh yeah definitely in parts, especially when you’re leading a bunch of overweight bunnies to their demise at the hands of a larger, more overweight bunny who wants nothing more than to eat them. I’m not sure the devs are looking to impart any particular meaning on you through the telling of this story or anything, I think it’s more that they just had a bunch of straight up craziness they wanted to get out in the public and the result is this. Demons then torment you along the way for the thrill of it, mostly through showing you a vast array of eldritch horrors that blend the real and demonic together in a beautifully terrifying collage of nope. The story itself is pretty straightforward: you’re a kid and you want your thing, but the demons are taking away your thing, so you’re going to follow it in order to get it back. ![]() ![]() Truly this seems to be the end game of the developers over at Amanita Designs: to lure us in with cuteness, get accustomed to their games before they can unleash their true horrors upon us. I took no less than 12 screenshots over the course of my short playthrough and, whilst I admit they’re exceptional, I also don’t want to look upon the horrors again as they’re just so freaking unsettling. Which is then starkly contrasted by the game’s visuals which, as gruesome as they are most of the time, are beautifully rendered in bring colours (the favourite of which is, of course, BLOOD RED). Worse still the game’s mechanics are direct reflections of all those old point and click and educational games of yesteryear, meaning you yourself are likely going to be feeling much like the child when you’re trying to navigate your way through this world of horror. You’ll stumble your way through all sorts of horrors as your character makes all sorts of whimpering, crying and generally “I AM NOT OK” kinds of noises. This game has you playing a young child who, for reasons unknown, is being tormented by powers from beyond our world who will use his most treasured possessions in order to get him to play along.
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