💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › hylics.gmi captured on 2024-06-20 at 11:52:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The official tagline is:
Hylics is a recreational program with light JRPG elements.
I think that sums it up pretty well.
This game is firmly in the category of "art games", so it's hard to answer that question.
Hylics is most famous for its unique graphics, done using claymation, and compressed to a limited color palette.
Screenshots don't do it justice, so here's an animated clip from the game's itch.io page.
The artwork is really well-made, and clearly a lot of care and love went into them, but at the same time Hylics does not treat itself too seriously, which I can respect. It's an absurdist game without a coherent plot, and in fact some of its dialogue is randomly-generated text. The turn-based gameplay is pretty standard for RPG Maker (just with more abstract actions) but at least it's relatively balanced.
Hylics is very memorable, and the absurdity of its story works well for its "vibe". On the other hand, the lack of story progression, combined with unremarkable gameplay, means that the game is just not all that fun to actually play. The good news is that it's short, but even if it's 2-3 hours long, it still took me two sittings to finish. It does have interesting moments though.
In terms of fun, I'd rate Hylics a *7/10*. But it's one of those "weird 7/10" games that will stick with me for a long time, like The Silver Case or OMORI. So, even if it can feel slightly tedious, I'd still highly recommend at least trying it. At some point I might try out Hylics 2.
It's a Windows game, but it mostly runs on Linux without a problem. However, for some weird reason, certain areas of the game lead to a lot of slowdown, also the fullscreen mode did not work properly so the game only showed up in one corner of my screen at 1x scale. But, it seems like these issues are also reported by Windows users, so I don't know if it's Linux's fault, or just RPG Maker being silly.
gardenapple - 2024-04-16
