When you’re faced with a wall of family portraits, Joey has something to say about each one of them. It doesn’t have a lot of backtracking either, though the world itself is also fun to explore. When you need to lure a pigeon down from a high place, you’re charged with looking for something that’s “bread like.” For a game that gets a little wacky sometimes, Hiveswap’s puzzles are fairly down-to-earth and don’t strain believability. When you’re looking for batteries, you can try to scavenge some from an old Sony Walkman and a TV remote. OK, true, you sometimes use your tap-dancing shoes to knock down piles of boxes and advance the story. But the real world practicality of tap-dancing aside, most of the puzzles make sense. It breaks the fourth wall, doesn’t take itself too seriously, but doesn’t shy away from moments of actual emotion either.
The characters are fun and likable, and it has a goofy sense of humor. Jude goes into red alert and babbles on about “psy ops” and “cryptid vanguards.” Joey thinks, “I really should write in my diary so if I die and they find my mangled body, they’ll know what happened to me.” They react pretty differently to eyeless alien blob monsters suddenly attacking their home. The quirky cast is rounded out by Jude, her conspiracy-nut younger brother who’s obsessed with The X-Files. Later on, Joey meets Xefros, a good ol’ red-blooded alien butler with mild psychic abilities that enable him to bend spoons - but more on that later.Įarly on, Joey and Jude trade witty barbs over their walkie talkies, and it’s just really fun to read. The protagonist is Joey Claire, a 14-year-old aspiring vet with a chip on her shoulder about her absentee dad and a love for tap-dancing. Hiveswap, on the other hand, nails a pop culture-y personality and teenaged attitude that somehow feels really genuine to me, a 31-year-old. There’s a lot of “Rad!” and “Totally!” and “The bomb dot com!”s. Most of the time, teenagers come across as a little hokey in video games. Cool teenagers who are not greeting their fellow children
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