Nintendo Switch Version Review

[ShadowBane]

Welcome to Hanwell, Nintendo Switch Review.

If you bought this for Steam and wonder how it is on the Nintendo Switch, here are my thoughts.

If you are reading this, then like me you went to Steam to read a review of this game since there is so little info about it out there.

So hopefully this will help you if you stumbled across this review and wonder if this game is worth your time and money.

I picked this one up when it went on sale at the eShop for around $3. Are there worse ways to spend $3? Sure, but there are also a lot of better ways as well.

Welcome to Hanwell is like a poorly written grade-school love letter to better survival horror games it tries to emulate. Think the original Resident Evil, and Silent Hill games, but made as a high school computer science class assignment.

The actual town of Hanwell is actually pretty large and well done. While the layout isn’t straight forward, it does make exploration somewhat interesting. That is until you realize just how empty it is.

The funny thing about this game is that there are weapons everywhere. Just walking down the road I came across seven crowbars, three cricket bats, a scythe and three long swords. Most of these are just lying in the middle of the road which brings up the question of why so many residents laid down their swords before leaving? Also why are there so many swords?

Unfortunately even though you are well armed, enemies are few and far between outdoors, and once you try to enter any building you are forced to drop your weapon and go in bare handed. The game literally make you chose to drop your weapon before entering any building. So I hope you enjoyed holding that sword that you didn’t use at all. And once you leave the building, the weapon you dropped is gone.

Now later in the game you do encounter one or two enemies outdoors, but by that point it seems like the weapons all disappeared. This gets really frustrating when for the last third of the game you have enemies that literally spawn right in front of you in order to prevent you from walking anywhere unless you can dodge them.

You are giving a radio that you can use to let you know when enemies are nearby, but these spawning enemies give you no warning which eliminates the usefulness of this tool.

The dialogue audio is very dialed in, by which I mean that any dialogue is actually heard on answering machines and voice mail. It is passable, but one character in particular is extremely overacted.

Again, this game feels like it is trying very hard to be something better than it is and I can’t fault it for that. I also like B-Horror movies for this very reason.

The combat is almost pointless. You have a block and attack button, but most enemies will come straight for you making them a very minor inconvenience, except for those spawning enemies which really suck once they come at you in droves.

There are some cool ideas in this game. At one point you get blinded and need to use a sonar style gameplay which allows you to “see” for a brief second but also gives your position away. It is not fully explained as to how you got this ability but if you try not to think about it too much I didn’t mind this new twist. Unfortunately this happens only for a few minutes, so once it is done, it’s over.

The main point of the game is to collect six pieces of an identification card, hidden in six different (and unlabeled on the map) buildings in order to enter yet another building and fight the boss.

Really that is the whole goal of the game.

There are three types of collectables, but honestly after completing the game I couldn’t care less about finding them.

One collectible in particular is finding 100 canisters hidden throughout the town. There is nothing to help you locate them other than the small hum when you are within a few feet of one. As I mentioned earlier Hanwell is actually very large, and the thought of searching every inch of it does nothing for me. The thing is, that right at the start of the game, it basically puts you in front of a locked door and tells you the only way to open it is to find all 100 canisters. A small part of me hopes that there is a better game hidden behind that door, but there is no way I am going to ever find out.

So for $3 this is actually a pretty fun game. There are some jump scares, and some chases. There is a story to discover by finding scraps of paper and listening to voicemail messages. There are even some very mild puzzles and backtracking. But in the end it is the boss fight that destroys this whole game.

Frustrating does not even begin to describe it. Everything in the last act leading up to the boss fight is actually some of the most interesting parts of this game, but then the boss appears and it actually makes me hate this game.

So no spoilers, but I will explain why it is so bad. The boss can be killed with just one single hit. That is strange enough as it is, but trying to hit the boss boils down to pure luck. I actually chatted with someone who tried for almost two weeks to land one single hit on this boss. I was so close to rage quitting and uninstalling the game that when I did hit the boss ( to clarify there is little in the way to tell you that you are not hitting the boss while this fight is going on) I was shocked that it was over. I actually shouted, “that’s it?” when the boss died and almost threw down my controller in disgust. It did take me almost more than an hour to land that one single hit. It honestly felt like the developer just gave up on the game and decided to make the game beat you up for no reason just because they could, and then bam it is over.

Now after coming back to Steam to post this review I realize that for the PC crowd there are actually two versions of this game. Welcome to Hanwell and Council of Hanwell. Nobody seems to know what the difference is and all I can guess is that people hated on this game so much that they decided to rename and resell it for some reason.

Which game for Steam is the version on Switch I can’t answer.

I will close by saying that for the most part I enjoyed my time in Hanwell. It was similar to community theater, poor acting and set design, but not a bad way to spend a few bucks or a few hours. Will I go back?

Nope.

But for $3, I got my money’s worth.

PROS:
Town is huge.
Lighting is mostly good
There is a story hidden in there but it is pretty bland
There are some cool ideas in this game.

CONS:
Voice acting is pretty bad.
No incentive to find all collectibles
Can’t use most of the weapons outside,
Can’t bring the weapons inside.
Combat is not satisfying anyways.
That boss battle is the dumbest and most frustrating moment ever.