NOCLIP Pocket E65 - Goopy Muck Boy - Hylics

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!