NOCLIP Pocket E65 - Goopy Muck Boy - Hylics

NOCLIP

Podcast: probably causes enemies to fall asleep. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Hylics, the “recreational program with light JRPG elements.” If this game appeals to you at first glance, it will be almost entirely based on its visual style and a promise of something a bit more out of the ordinary. As far as visuals go, it fully meets that expectation. This game has an absurd art style, with a claymation-like aesthetic and designs, both for characters and for props and scenery in the environment, that are colorful, interesting and difficult to parse. Characters lack obvious human qualities, environments look more like someone’s messy desk than traversable locations and in combat actions are punctuated by hand gestures and visual effects that are as beautiful as they are strange. The parts of the game you actually interact with, moving around the world and engaging in combat, are also odd but don’t stand out quite as much. An obvious effort was made to make sure things don’t progress in the way you’d expect them to. You’re rewarded after your first few deaths, traditional leveling systems are absent and combat is pretty unforgiving until you figure out how to gain additional party members (or where to even go to begin this process), and that lack of direction is part of the uneasy feeling this game wants you to have. The combat is more basic, leaning pretty heavily on its aesthetic design to make it feel unique, which it mostly succeeds at doing. Hylics is a game that has earned its reputation and if you think it might be for you, it probably is. We’re going to be talking about the early parts of the game and how confusing and off-putting they can be, the indecipherability of characters and text, and how the game is exactly like Pac-Man. Thank you for joining us again this week! This one was suggested to us, and falls under that elusive category of “exactly the thing we want to do on Pocket.” It’s short, cheap, and does a lot of things in an unorthodox way, resulting in a something that gives you a lot to chew on. This is one of those games that may not top many people’s favorite games lists, but you do want to go through if you’re interested in things that buck the rules of game design and use the medium in a more freeform way. If you are one of those people, what did you think of Hylics? Did it live up to your expectations? Are you more thoughtful than us and were able to pick out what the game had to say? Let us know over in our Discord server or in the comments below! Next time, we’re going to be talking about one of the earliest indie darlings, Audiosurf, a rhythm game that lets you play on tracks procedurally generated from audio files on your own computer, so be sure to check back in for that!