Horace is the most pathetic platformer I have played in years

[gatto_nero]

How this could have such high ratings?
Game is borring to the bone.
Camera works wierdly.
Music is horrible.
Game story is tragicly boring - I dont care for him.

Why you like in this game?

[AscendedHologram]

To everyone else:

"To the Moon" is actually a wonderful experience. It really isn't a "game", per se, but more like a long, interactive cutscene made with 2D pixel/sprite art. The story is engaging, twisting, and genuinely full of emotion. Love, tragedy, death, loss, dream fulfillment, looking back on a life and all of its successes and failures, etc. If you don't come out of that experience having cried at at least SOME point, frankly, you aren't human.

For those who've never heard of it, "To the Moon" is an RPG Maker game, except there are no "battles" or anything and the graphics are actually good. It is set in a near-future where people have invented ways to alter people's memories, and to even let multiple people experience them in an Inception kind of way by doing a dream-sharing like thing. So, naturally, people attempted to use this technology to create artificial memories fulfilling fantasies and such. This turned out to be so deleterious for the people waking up having had their memories altered (think kind of like Total Recall, but where the person waking up after the procedures carries false memories instead) that it is only legal to do on people who are about to die within the next few days. You work for a company which specializes in providing these services, and you are contracted to fulfill this one man's dying wish: to go to the moon. He doesn't know WHY he wants to go to the moon, though...just that he does. So your mission is to delve through this man's memories of his entire life, find out why he wants to go to the moon, and then alter his life in his memory in order to make him believe that he successfully went to the moon in his lifetime.

To The Moon is honestly one of the most moving pieces of media I have ever consumed, and I couldn't recommend enough that everyone play it if they ever get the chance.

[gatto_nero]

There are better games and worser games and optimal way is to play only those best. We have limited timeline.

What I wanted to tell in my initial post - do not waste your live for average games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBzF1kq1F74

[uhmdown]

I agree with gatto_nero on most of his points. There's a lot about Horace that really bothers me.

- The music really does suck. Horaces music is ridiculously simplistic in a bad way (it even sounds like old-fashion MIDI); but you know what? I don't care. Maybe the dev had to make do with what he had. I can live with it.
- Because of the bland music, I hate the rhythm mini-games. But Horace forces you to play them occasionally.
- I feel like it made a valiant effort to get me emotionally invested in the characters, but it lost me after a few chapters. Ultimately, I feel like it's trying too hard. But whatever. Maybe the dev isn't trained in storytelling. The story may be meh now, but thats not why I'm playing it anymore anyways.

Gatto, there's one thing you're dead wrong on: the game mechanics actually do get very very interesting. But it takes a long time to get there. You must have given up on the game pretty early, before the more interesting mechanics got introduced.

Also, I feel like Horace nails boss fights; they are really good. Sometimes boss fights can make or break a game, so I am pleasantly surprised that Horace has consistently good boss fights.

Honestly, I feel the game overall is super weird, but I think thats the point. And its also the reason why I keep playing. I don't even consider it a puzzle platformer at this point. It's just a weird game full of quirky variety that doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ what you think; and I just want to see what else the developer tried to cram into this game. Some of the stuff is actually really cool.
I had to stop at chapter 14 though, due to a game-breaking bug (in the mansion with the 4 robots; don't fight one of the robots while holding a bomb you got from another robot), and I refuse to start over. I hope it gets fixed.

I can only imagine what the dev could have done if he had more resources to up the production value.


@Stovich: come on, nobody cares about grammar thaaaat much : P

[uhmdown]

4. Advice
play games such as
- Celeste
- Limbo
- To The Moon

Hell yeah ! These are amazing.

There are better games and worser games and optimal way is to play only those best. We have limited timeline.

What I wanted to tell in my initial post - do not waste your live for average games

Absolutely agree; which is why I'm playing Horace : D you can't call this game average; its waay waaaay too weird for that !


(to be fair, I didn't pay for it. I got it for free from Epic Games. I don't think I would have given it a chance otherwise)

[gatto_nero]

Thanks for support - sorry for bad writting I made really lazy attempt to answer as I was very very disapointed - Im happy I wrote to you guys...
Best advice!
If you purchase Horace then try it right away you have about 1 hour and 45 minutes to evaluate. You can love it or hate it depends from person to person. If you hate then you can return.

Thanks again for not destroying my baby cry xD Thanks for discussion.

[AlwaysAngron]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย gatto_nero:

Thanks for support - sorry for bad writting I made really lazy attempt to answer as I was very very disapointed - Im happy I wrote to you guys...
Best advice!
If you purchase Horace then try it right away you have about 1 hour and 45 minutes to evaluate. You can love it or hate it depends from person to person. If you hate then you can return.

Thanks again for not destroying my baby cry xD Thanks for discussion.

No.

[Foxtopus]

Grabbed this for free on the competitor platform, and I get what he's saying. The jokes started to really rub me wrong when they were racing to give the Japanese contact some hope of survival but then took a day off to get high, because the dev really isn't a writer. Not even the kind of hack writer that most games get.

Moreover, jokes are funny or at least amusing when they surprise you, but this game insists on telling every joke about two times too many. Half of the game knows what year it's in but then they don't bother to do a pixel art version of the US president from that year, I guess because it thinks the audience is stupid? This thing hurts a lot so we'll just leave it like that for several minutes, and not like when we're playing physical pain for a laugh.

As for the platforming- it's not that it's bad but that the guy doesn't know how to design puzzles and that he didn't handle edge cases very well. I'm not surprised that I glitch through the floor with mechanics like these, but I am surprised that the game just lets me diagonal jump when I cling around corners, without that being a tool that you can actually use to get anywhere interesting. Clearly the guy likes to design some areas without you using the shoes all the time, but the sections of the game where he just declares that they don't work, when he's already demonstrated that he's beyond comfortable putting lasers, sparks and similar things on any wall that he doesn't want you walking on- feels like I'm being cheated.

Usually these games make you build up a toolset, but this one really didn't. It's not unusual for indie games to not have a good idea of what the end game experience needs to feel like, and even some triple A games get kind of gummed up by the stuff they give you near the end, but this gave me both of my high power abilities really early on and then just trickled niche elements and a move that unlocks certain paths without ever having to think about new ways to use it (especially since some enemies are vulnerable to it before actually buying the upgrade.)

The game engine really chugs in places where he decided to use round surfaces, and thankfully the game doesn't have a ton of those, but it really shouldn't have ever had any big ones with the way it behaves.

And then, I get why he didn't think to let you skip cutscenes, but where a lot of the deaths are kind of drawn out, you really should have been able to skip cutscenes that the game will play multiple times.

A lot of these things are polish, but having played through this game it seems very much like he didn't know what kind of gameplay he actually wanted to make. Rather, this is a vessel for writing a sloppy war and genocide story that doesn't take either of those subjects seriously, but does feature the cast of a sitcom.


It's kind of not bad, but it's way too full of itself, relative to what he was actually able to accomplish here. Pretty good for one guy, but really lacking for the level of praise heaped on it.

[Reg]

@gatto_nero How can you say the story is boring and the level design sucks if you didn't even play two hours…
Guess what? You're the most pathetic and boring here.

Go back and play with your modelling clay, kidz

[MAT]

I don't blame people who don't like the game - it starts a bit slowly. But it gets really creative later on. Some sections are really hard, but there is one 'cheat': just kill yourself fast and retry several times. Then the game should give you one hit point ball (or whatever those are) free, and you should manage to clear the section with that. But this doesn't work in all sections.

[Revlis]

Every bleeping mini game goes on for too bleeping long.

[robotups]

I know that several others have already responded to this in great ways, but this "review" kind of pisses me off. I'm glad that people have looked beyond the original post to the comments and discovered what a good game this really is, but the original post is just a mess.

The fact that you had played the game little enough to refund it and goes to leave a bad review because it had a rough start just blows me away how ignorant some people can be.
I don't disagree with everything said, some arguments are valid, but you only had less than 2 hours to let the game really sink in. For this game, that's not enough.

If you bought the game, then PLAY IT. you put in the money, so don't make it a waste.
This game isn't like other games, the first 2 hours aren't designed to not make you want to refund it as they don't really give a glimpse into the game, but even people who didn't like it that much went in and tried to beat it.

If you don't like this game, then don't like this game. I'm not stopping you. If you're gonna go leave a bad review, go do that (but with proper spelling and grammar). This game isn't for everyone. I just recommend to actually play the games that you paid for, And if you don't like it and decide to refund it, actually look more into it before telling people the game sucks.

[gatto_nero]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย robotups:

I know that several others have already responded to this in great ways, but this "review" kind of pisses me off. I'm glad that people have looked beyond the original post to the comments and discovered what a good game this really is, but the original post is just a mess.

The fact that you had played the game little enough to refund it and goes to leave a bad review because it had a rough start just blows me away how ignorant some people can be.
I don't disagree with everything said, some arguments are valid, but you only had less than 2 hours to let the game really sink in. For this game, that's not enough.

If you bought the game, then PLAY IT. you put in the money, so don't make it a waste.
This game isn't like other games, the first 2 hours aren't designed to not make you want to refund it as they don't really give a glimpse into the game, but even people who didn't like it that much went in and tried to beat it.

If you don't like this game, then don't like this game. I'm not stopping you. If you're gonna go leave a bad review, go do that (but with proper spelling and grammar). This game isn't for everyone. I just recommend to actually play the games that you paid for, And if you don't like it and decide to refund it, actually look more into it before telling people the game sucks.

2 hours - lenght of movie where you can determine if its epic or its failure...
Im leaving review here. Its obviously personal. You could play this game if you never played anything better.

Today gaming industry is so competitive because of many many titles so Im going from the direction "dont waste your life for medicore and bad games"

review and everything I wrote was subjective to me - you may love or hate ... I recommended other games for you - obviously its your time and you spent it on anything you like

but

why so few reviews for this game? no virus marketing? ppl not recommend it to others?

[Beak]

Listen sunbeam, this game is old school. It's meant for fans of Horace goes skiing, Star Wars, Manic Miner, Back to the Future etc etc etc. And you are so wrong, this game has so much heart you can almost hear it beating throughout the game.

I think that maybe there are two problems here:
1) you are young and cannot relate to the old school references
2) it's hard for you. Don't take that as a critical comment, it is hard but because that is how the old platformers used to be, bloody hard.

Anyway I've written enough and I want to get back to Horace, needed a breather lol.

But sure go ahead and write a bad review if you feel that inclined but don't come hear trolling. I hate trolls, they are the sub species of the internet sewage system. Don't be a troll.

Oh and before you go through my game list, I own it on the Epic game system and just came here for some walkthrough help in Chapter 14 - best path back with the Water Boss bomb anyone ??????.

good bye, stay safe but above all - don't be a troll

[gatto_nero]

Im old skool. My first computer was C64 I also had pleasure of using Atari 65XE, Amstrad, Spectrum, Amiga 500, Atari ST, 386 DX.... mhhhm I played unlimited number of platformer games.
Is horace hard? Play Celeste please this is one of the best platformer I have ever played it has beautifly hand crafted levels. Every square o level can count. Its like masterpiece.
Im happy that Epic gave away Celeste twice... hope you have it.

[Baron Karza]

IMHO horace is a game of pure poetry with a really nice level design.
I'm not talking about how hard it is, I'm talking about level design that I found really nor too hard nor too easy.