Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure follows a lord who takes hallucinogens to revisit hist lost betrothed, but it turns out that getting into fights while tripping is a bad idea.
Lord Moebius has had a rough time with his marriage, his servants having snooped on details they ought not to have. This has resulted in losing the lord’s beloved, and the poor dude can’t think of any better way to get her back that to take dangerous hallucinogens to recall her memory. They kind of recall memories of the guy’s enemies as well, resulting in a twisted battleground filled with slavering creatures and fragmented recollections of love.
Platforming and fighting aren’t really things one should be doing while tripping out, and unfortunately, Hippocampus makes that abundantly clear. In battle, you need to draw your weapons out, but this costs you health. Not a huge deal, but using your charged up weapon also costs health. Fighting with a charged weapon gets you health back if you land powerful hits, which should be a good thing! Except that the enemies chew through your life bar, requiring you to attack frantically just to stay alive. The game touts Dark Souls as an inspiration, and while it is definitely hard, having to blindly rush through combat without thinking is about as far from the Souls series as it gets.
The stages are laid out in meandering ways, making it difficult to figure out where you need to go even when you’re in an enclosed room. Usually, you need to jump somewhere, but these platforms are laid out all over the place, and your ability to aim a jump is dicey at best. This results in a lot of trial and error in getting jumps right, and while you respawn quickly, I’d rather have tighter controls than the ability to try again over and over.
The rapid respawns seem to be a weak repair for the imprecise jumping and combat controls, giving players the ability to get through with enough patience rather than enough skill. The result is a game that gets aggravating in a hurry. But I guess guiding around a guy who’s high on hallucinogens probably would be, too.
Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure is available now on Steam.
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