I don't have a lot of positive things to say about HGH. Most high points are incidental. An ambitious, but overall ill-planned, design did somehow still require decent loading times and enemy variety. That said, while you feel the background presence of meager joy, it is legitimately difficult to point out in a text review without being dragged down a rabbit hole of confusion and frustration.
There's not going to be a good way to format what amounts to a rant, so I apologize to anyone who gives this review time. You'll profit though, if I can convince you to pass this up.
Animation and art direction in this game are a spectacle, but both contain deep cut flaws. Animation frames are wasted. There's tons of excess movement that doesn't convey information well and there's this weird beat and bounce to everything. Shantae's idle animation doesn't need to be readable from three blocks away. If you've ever seen a theatre actor make a film debut, it's that problem.
That root problem is shared with the art direction. There's too high a volume. HGH is swamped in unique art assets past the point where the game can make use of them. Shantae has too many transformations with too little impact. Every inch of every map has something unique, but without a willingness to sprawl you get chubby and claustrophobic rooms and too little overall variety in the different worlds.
The bread-and-butter gameplay is uncomfortable. The main gimmick is transformations and you are basically menu'ing twenty times to cross a room. Most of said transformations (save the god-blessed Monkey) make the game worse for a breath before you have to transform again. None beside the chimp and free-flight give you actual choice in platforming or combat.
Shantae cannot move and attack, enemy health takes multiple seconds to deplete, and they are just packed in those rooms. I'll save you the rest of details, but add in a surplus of healing and you are inevitably funneled into vaulting enemies and accepting damage as part of god's plan. Why bother mashing A or selecting the right spell (until every spell is the right spell) or changing from the monkey to Shantae and back. You have other things that need doing, many, many things.
This game lacks the positive character traits to amount to 'adventurous'. Levels are linear, long, and scarce. You play each of the four around four times, with each after the first being an unabridged chore. The story even lampoons this - you are on an episodic children's show with overlapping grocery lists and scavenger hunts.
There is no practical alternative to this nauseous experience. Per level: progression requires a couple revisits, the real ending requires about one more, 100% requires maybe one more than that. The difference between each is about 5% of collectables. A typical, fresh play through is unlikely to avoid end game equipment or spells even during a purposeful shallow run. Any of the 5 or 6 truly good upgrades available, or just a high health pool, will utterly break the game even beyond Shantae's font of inventory healing. I 'oopsed' upon all of the art gallery keys and from that was made immune to damage. My finale then was a few rooms of shitty Flappy Bird.
I stand by that there was not a single, positive, critical decision made in this game. I'll offer up a moment where I stepped into a room, received an upgrade to extract items from flowers, only to realize the game pointlessly prevented me from returning to the previous room which ended with a flower. Shantae was 18 inches away from it, I was 3 minutes. This was a revisit and you can only fast travel to the beginning of rooms. I assume the speedrun mode that lets you play levels once and attack while moving could be fun, but that's $10 DLC. This was a Kickstarter game.
