Hamstermind Review - This Hamster is a Dark Horse
It’ll take some doing to dislodge Hamstermind from my pick for dark horse game of the year. Its veneer of cutesy graphics and simple controls hide a cruel centre. Not unfairly cruel, but I was overly confident after about five hours with the game, leading to an almost Icarus-style fall from grace when the game consistently humbled me in the later half. Hamstermind is your friend, but also your enemy.
From what I can tell, this is the first Steam release by Righteous Tree, a small French studio. They’ve got some background in puzzle games, so Hamstermind isn’t exactly out of left field. Puzzle games are really hard to design, though, so I was surprised by just how engrossing this game is. You play as Hamster Jones, who is sent a mysterious package with a challenge: solve the puzzles in Charaon’s pyramid and win his prize, a wish. The package contains an artefact that allows you to rotate things, which will be critically important for your adventure.
Whilst dialogue and story aren’t the most critical focus, I did really enjoy Charaon’s antics. He’s silly and plays coy, all whilst plotting to stop you. Similarly, the people on Hamster’s team are fun to talk to, even if they play it a bit straighter.
The pyramid has plenty of puzzles. Each room (generally) has two puzzles: the main one to progress, and smaller side-puzzles that act half as the game’s collectables and half as unlocks for extra costumes and hints for the game’s big puzzle. The main puzzle mostly revolves (ha) around a 2×2 square grid, manoeuvring each square into a place that allows you to collect each of the light motes, allowing you to progress to the next room once all are collected. The game does an excellent job of expanding upon each of these puzzles. Maybe it’ll add in statues that lock rotation when you’re within line of sight, maybe it’ll add lasers that need to be directed to specific places to unlock new paths, or to push or pull a block into position. Later in the game, it’ll mix some of those completed rooms up even further, in ways that really surprised me. As I said, the game amps up its difficulty nicely – I could complete some of the earlier rooms in a few minutes, but some of the late game rooms, marked as Mastermind difficulty, would have me stuck for 20-30 minutes, shifting things around until I found something that gave me a glimmer at a solution.
The other type of puzzle is one that really works for me, and that’s slide puzzles. Generally, you’re trying to get a scarab block or similar into the scarab-marked hole, and that can be done by rotating the puzzle box by 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. As per the other puzzle, the game amps up things nicely here, adding obstacles, beetles blowing wind, more animal blocks to add in and more. These become really challenging, but they’re optional, so it’s not like you’ll die by not completing them.
It’s not all greatness, though. There were three things that annoyed me. The game has a hint system for some puzzles, but not for either of the main ones. There were times I was beating my head against a wall for a solution, and whilst I always recommend struggling in games, I got close to putting this down a few times because I just couldn’t think of a way to progress. Each time I would come back a few hours later, try something, and it’d work, and I’d still get that “eureka” moment that puzzles games seek to dole out, but I think it might turn some people off. Secondly, and most annoyingly for me, is the game’s lack of borderless windowed mode. It seems small, but when I was trying to graph out a puzzle or doing some math in another window, the game would minimise. It’s a small thing, but it suuuucks. The game does have a windowed mode, but I find title bars garish and take away from the experience for me. The final thing for me is the lack of puzzle options. You complete a puzzle room, and the next unlocks. If you’re stuck, there are precious few times when you could go to another puzzle and play around there for a bit. Instead, you’d have to beat your head against the puzzle until its done. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by games like The Witness, but having a few puzzle path progression options would be nice.
Hamstermind is honestly amazing. I’ll play most anything if it’s got an interesting hook, but for a studio without a ton of titles under its belt, I think this game punches well above its weight. There are still a lot of puzzles I haven’t finished, including what I would consider the ‘ultra hard’ ones, like the game’s language puzzle (straight out of one of the studio’s other games), and some very tricky puzzles hiding away in the corners of some rooms. Now, if you’ll excuse me, those puzzles sure as hell won’t solve themselves.
Hamstermind was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
