Hank: Drowning on Dry Land

Drunk yes, Batman no

Why

Why Not

Impressions

Man what a strange experience. This game has two characters and can take as little as 20 minutes to complete, but it does a lot with that time. Both Hank and The Unraveler pack a lot of personality into their dialogue, leaving you feeling as if you know them pretty well after just the intro. They're not especially one-dimensional though; if you have enough time to spare The Unraveler will happily wax philosphically on the nature of Hank's powers, while Hank grunts along or disagrees as you choose. There're quite a few ways The Unraveler's villain monolgue can go, and Hank's handy rewind power lets you explore them all fairly quickly.

It also lets you discover a way out of your seemingly doomed situation through trial and error; rewinding time if you fail or die and speeding it up to earn style points or get through the bits you already solved. Hank can also use mirrors to split the timeline, creating copies of himself he'll need to avoid to prevent failure due to a paradox. You can definitely see the bones of a good game here, but to flesh out the body there definitely needs to be less linear problem-solving, and I could see enabling that becoming much harder as scale increases.

There are a few different ways to approach escaping, but they all boil down to the same basic flow with some tweaks for efficiency or style. I got most of the way there on my second attempt by just following the only path I could; in a full game based on this concept I think you'd probably want a lot more choice to take advantage of your rewinds and branched selves.

This isn't a full game though (well it is, but one whose length matches its tiny price) and I had a good time with what is here. The characters, art and voice acting all do a great job selling the theme here, and the gameplay does enough to keep you interested over its brief runtime while offering some reason to replay if you want to explore dialogue paths, improve your efficiency or just hunt achievements. I definitely recommend giving this a go for the price, and am eager to see if they do something bigger with this concept.