Helltaker is the Super Meat Boy of sliding block puzzle/demon romance games
Since it can be difficult to find time to finish video games, let alone find interesting ones that will provide a complete entertaining experience in a few hours. For this series I’ll talk about a short game that could easily be played to completion over a weekend.
Helltaker is about a big burly 90’s action hero looking guy waking up one day and deciding he wants a harem of demon girls. So he goes to hell to try and woo them, which requires first solving a block sliding puzzle to get to each demon. Followed by a short romance visual novel sequence where you attempt to pick the right response to get them to join you.
Although most of the demons seem less interested in you romantically, and more interested in either doing something besides be in hell or to see how poorly this goes when you finally get them all together. It is that sort of humorous take in the writing, along with incredibly expressive and distinct poses for the characters (which help to distinguish each demon girl even though they all share similar appearances, just styled differently), that make the game much more charming than I was expecting.
However the real appeal of the game is actually the sliding block puzzles. Each level is a bit of trial and error as you find the right sequence in how you move and push/kick things to get you to the demon girl before you are out of moves. But in the way are lots of obstacles that want to eat up those moves. Skeleton enemies and rocks you can kick to move one space (skeletons get destroyed if they are kicked into a solid object, rocks don’t), but doing so takes a turn. There are spikes that steal a turn when you step on them, and locked doors that require you to first get a key in another part of the puzzle in order to bypass.
Aside from the last level you can tackle each puzzle at your own pace, which normally means you can go as slow as you want, but here that also means as fast as you want. You are able to move and the puzzles reset so fast, that while it initially felt like I was brute forcing the puzzles, I was actually just going through each solution idea I thought of on the fly in the game instead of in my head. It feels great to be able to get that kind of instantaneous feedback on a solution especially if something doesn’t behave quite how you thought it would. This in turn kept me more engaged then I normally would be with this sort of game, where stopping to think about a solution can often led to getting distracted by something else.
The game’s last level though is a bit of a curveball, abandoning the move at your own pace sliding block puzzles for a more actiony kinetic boss fight. Initially it feels like being thrown in the deep end without really knowing how to swim, because of how differently it plays. However it isn’t random and so not built on how fast you can react, instead it relies on you learning the pattern and timing for when and how to move. Which is sort of like what you had been doing although on a timer, but the visual language of the fight makes it a bit disorienting at first.
Even though that last level can be frustrating it’s hard to really hold it against it given that the game is still finishable in about an hour. Which had me leaving Helltaker wishing there was more of it. More of these characters and what shenanigans they get up to now, and also out of curiosity for what other mechanics they might come up with for their puzzles. It’s a game I can see myself coming back to every few months for fun or as a nice quick palette cleanser.
Helltaker was developed by vanripper, and is available on Steam for free. It takes about an hour to finish.
