Hylics 2 (2020)

I've been wanting to play this for forever. I watched a lets play of the first game back when it came out. I must say I was very disappointed by this game. I want to love it, and I want to play it. But honestly, the game is so janky and feels awful to play.

The encounters are a jumbled mess of information that is never explained and the learning curve is brutal. Most of the time I felt like the battles were unfair. This made me avoid battles, which in turn didn't help with the leveling. I even turned the difficulty down to the lowest, but even this didn't help.

After dying repeatedly, and not feeling like power leveling on my already limited weekend game time, I actually decided to shelf this game, 3 hours in. A true shame, since the art the music, and the vibes are some of the best I've seen. But again, the level design and the randomness didn't lend to the game's potential, as it didn't add anything to draw me far enough into the world to want to stay in it to level up my party.

I'm sure if you're a relatively normal person that doesn't mind putting some extra time into leveling and that RPG stuff the battles wouldn't really be a problem. But for me this just wasn't enough.

Hylics 2 is a janky buggy broken mess with a lot of heart. It's definitely one of the best games I've played this year, and a worthy successor to the original Hylics game. It took me about 14 hours to complete (on normal difficulty).

Much like the original Hylics, this game is a surreal kind of JRPG. After defeating the spherical orange-head guy, the world was at peace for a time. However, his minions were secretly at work, trying to piece him together and bring a new age of darkness upon the world. And thus it comes down to our hero "Wayne" to once again fight against the agents of chaos and to absolve this fair archipelago.

The most enjoyable features of this experience are the art and the music. All of the visuals are deliciously surreal, mostly constructed from hand-crafted clay as in the original. The music is also fantastic. This game is a beautiful thing to witness, an illustrious assault to the senses. The gameplay itself is actually pretty standard. Most of the game involves exploration of this group of islands; talking to various characters, meeting goblins and blobs, flying around in your spacecraft. This exploration/platforming/puzzle-solving loop is broken up by turn-based combat and also a few 2D-platforming sections. It's a real mixed bag. Most of it is very awkward and broken, but it still retains a lot of charm. The original game was made with RPGmaker, a very strong foundation, and while this game is much more impressive and ambitious, the one-man developer clearly struggled with Unity, and thus you'll find yourself battling bugs and crashes just as often as you're fighting enemies. Much of the baked-in positives of RPGmaker are missing. The controls are clunky and unresponsive. Many of the familiar JRPG mechanics are absent, and combat feels a little bit stilted and unbalanced.

Regardless of the flaws, I still really enjoyed this experience. There's so much to see and explore in this game, so many peculiar characters to meet, cities to visit, strange vistas to wander across. The sound design and the visuals and the vibrancy of it all makes up for the technical difficulties. I feel that, overall, Hylics 1 is a better game. My only complaint with this game is the lack of randomised dialogue, which I really enjoyed in the original.

For anyone wishing to descend into this surreal dreamscape, I would suggest playing Hylics first. And if you truly adore it, then it's definitely worth playing Hylics 2. It's exceedingly ambitious, creative and interesting. It's a magnificent mess, it's not for everyone, but I quite enjoyed it.