Hoodwink – Review
Hoodwink is a point-and-click advenure game released by E-studio and is available for download on Origin. A genre that was very popular quite some time ago, let’s see if E-studio is able to combine retro and new.
Story:
Hoodwink is a game which resides in the future. (a not so good looking future) The world looks like one big slum filled with people with poor Asian accents and Robots which have a human brain inside their shiny (or not so shiny) metal head. These so called second-chancers and pretty much the entire area are controlled by a big corporation called Unicorp. They suppy the people with medicine and ofcourse ”body-altering-second-chances”.
You play the game as Michael Bezzle, a not so successful ‘thief’, who tries to settle down. The game pretty much revolves around Michael trying to propose to his fiancé, but of course those nasty Unicorp policemen (and some kind of mystery villain) are messing up your romantic plans. It’s a vague description, but too many details would spoil the game.
Note: The game throws you right in the scene where you are stealing your wife-to-be’s wedding ring to finally be able to propose to her. While doing so you will get interrupted…
Graphics:
Hoodwink is not a game with top-notch graphics but the cell-shaded look looks really appealing for this game. The characters each have their own personalities and the city really gives you the feeling of a world that messed up somewhere along the way. There isn’t much more to say about how the game looks ,yet for a downloadable game they succeeded in making the game an appealing experience.
Sound:
First of all the music of Hoodwink is great. It gives you that old school detective feeling and it tends to pull you deeper inside the game. Then we get the downside of the music, it gets repeated so much that after a while you want to turn of the music completely and just put on your own soundtrack in the back. Having said that, that’s probably the only downside when it comes to the sound of the game. The sfx and voices are well done and like the graphics they really suit the style of the game.
Note: The developers chose a great cast to give the game it’s humoristic feel.
Gameplay:
As the introduction stated the game is a point-and-click adventure game, which pretty much speaks for itself. During the game you will guide Michael around to complete several small puzzles and ofcourse interact with different characters and objects. To keep track of what you collected and what you have done or have to do, you get an inventory and a journal. This all can be called a pretty standard formula for this kind of game.
Hoodwink however excels in making a theme, that’s not so common in games, very appealing. The game consists out of you running around, exploring areas. By exploring areas I mean hovering your cursor over every single object in a room or area to see if you can interact with it.
The game itself consists out of several acts, each having their own main puzzle and also their own game length. (there are four right now, but the game will receive extra content in the future) These acts are mainly filled with a problem Michael needs to solve. Hoodwink’s puzzles are pretty much always finding several items for you to progress to another act. Also a pretty common way of playing point-and-click adventure games. It all went good so far until the game offers us several ‘minigames’. These minigames are quite horrible and seem to be inserted for the sole purpose of lengthening the gameplaytime. In one of the so called ‘minigames’ you have to keep yanking at a lantern to make the lightbulb fall off. I can honestly say, I had to click more than when I’m playing Diablo III and even then the ‘progressmeter’ was filling so slowly I probably waisted several minutes of my life doing absolutly nothing.
All in all the gameplay is very enjoyable and the difficulty varies plently to add some challenging parts to the game.
Tip: Look everywhere to see if you can interact with something!
Conclusion:
Hoodwink is a fun game with its own style. Except for the few bugs (I was playing the pre-release verion) it was very fun to finally play a point-and-click adventure game again. If they add some fun extra’s in the coming acts it’s a game worth looking out for.
Hoodwink - Review,
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