REVIEW : Hoa (PS5)
Hoa, which begins with a red-clad heroine floating to shore on a palm leaf canoe and the tinkling of lovely piano music, maintains a laid-back tone for practically the entire two-hour runtime. This simple puzzle-platformer combines the breathtaking, hand-painted visuals of a Studio Ghibli film with a simple set of game mechanics to create a relaxing voyage through nature that never gets old.
Hoa’s simple storey is inspired by Vietnamese mythology and centres on the titular fairy, who has driven away from her clan as a newborn following a mysterious but terrible event. The storey opens with Hoa’s return to her homeland, where she must utilise her magical abilities to resurrect the landscape and its inhabitants. Sunflowers blossom when Hoa approaches, creating platforms out of petals, and rhino beetles can be beckoned closer to help her push huge obstructions.
It’s all quite intuitive, to the point where Hoa doesn’t require any on-screen interface to hinder your view of its beautiful universe. Its puzzle design is similarly clean and possibly even oversimplified, with only a few late-game (applied loosely in a two-hour game) techniques confusing enough to make me think twice. Hoa lags far behind games like Limbo and Little Nightmares II in terms of brainteasers, but that at least allowed me to unwind and enjoy the serenity that comes with riding on the backs of flying ladybugs through a forest canopy and exploring inky underwater depths by the glowing light of a school of jellyfish.
Puzzle Peace
While there are adversaries to be discovered in Hoa, there are no death states or harm of any type to be found. Hoa can be stung by mechanical spiders, but the worst they can do is knock her back a few metres. Along the way, you’ll come across huge animals like a moss-covered rock monster and a towering octopus. These may have been intimidating bosses in other games, but they’re here as friends rather than foes: the laid-back rulers of each habitat who assign you the chore of hunting down butterflies in exchange for clearing a route forward.
One action-packed chase moment later in the adventure, with Hoa dodging flaming blasts and leaping over a passage of heaving machinery. Still, it’s a cutscene intended to add drama to Hoa’s storey rather than a difficult playable platforming segment designed to generate stress purposely. Hoa is, for the most part, a warm bubble bath for your brain, with practically every aspect of the experience designed to relax you. With each double-jump twirl, for example, Hoa scatters a small cloud of glittering pixie dust, and as she swings on flowery vines, they softly clap together like wooden wind chimes. Hoa’s beauty will warm your heart, but it will not make it beat faster; the only arrhythmic effect it has is on the stuttering framerate.
Hoa is like a warm bubble bath for your brain.
There are some unforgettable scenes in Hoa, such as stumbling into a wrestling arena full of rhino beetles or scaling a maze built out of the glistening threads of a spider’s web, but the story’s climax is the one that sticks with me the most. The colour pallet changes to a stark black and white here, and you get to go through a variety of remixed pieces from previous stages, with fascinating wrinkles like mirrored vistas and rotating surroundings that make the puzzle-platforming even more challenging. Hoa’s sudden burst of creativity in the last fifteen minutes made me wish he could have gone on a little longer.
If not for a longer period, I wish there were some secrets to be discovered. As you go, Hoa gains a few movement upgrades. Still, even though a hovering ability allows you to reach previously unreachable regions off the main road, there’s nothing to find there. Hoa is primarily a straight adventure, a shame because the game’s environments are so captivating that I would have appreciated more opportunities to explore them.
REVIEW : The Big Con (XBOX Series X)
