Writing my first ever review for Steam, and I think this game deserves that honor, given how obscure it is. [b]A Happy Place[/b] is a retro collectathon that tries it hardest to disguise itself as a completely normal game that isn't totally horror, but what set itself from the others, is how the horror parts presents itself, and the underlaying story. And also that it is a pretty solid game overall, don't forget that.
Fair warning for anyone reading this, my review will contain SPOILERS, but they'll be marked.
First, let my sing my praises about this game. Has bats and you can play as one, which automatically makes this 10/10 in my book, I am totally not biased in this, but for the sake of having a objective review that isn't influenced by personal preferences, I'll those leave out of my final rating.
All levels as well their dark world sides are decently designed at minimum, none of them feels like a slog to play though, and the dark world sides feel different from each other and usually have a gimmick to keep themselves fresh. None of the monsters in the dark worlds are insta-killers (save for one), which is thankful for players who kinda suck at platforming, and if they "technically" are, they just reset players back to a checkpoint and possibly lose some progress. There are scares to be had here, rarely jumpscares [i](usually the result of screwing a part up or doing secrets)[/i], and one can see the scares coming a few seconds away, giving anyone dread as they know something is about to happen, I like feeling that. Also The Pit was a new take on a "lives" system I haven't seen before, despite not being properly explained. My favorite level has to be Fever Freeway, definitely not because of the bats, but how its dark world side is intertwined with it, [spoiler]learning how and trying to bait the monster into the spikes each time was one of my personal highlights[/spoiler].
It's admittedly janky with the implementation of some features... I'm specifically looking at swimming [i](really sucks if you have bad coordination as the camera doesn't follow in the direction of where you're going)[/i], Ivan [i](that cat solider in Rigged Ridge, while I've picked up on what he does pretty quickly, it isn't properly explained, and his pineapple grenades can still harm you, as I had to learn that the hard way)[/i], and The Pit [i](even though a NPC can spawn to help clarify how it works, but this only appears later in the game, possibly after Calcium Catacombs)[/i]. I'll look past those issues given that the dev refers to the game as a "large series of workarounds", and works on a engine that was discontinued almost a decade ago at the time of typing this [i](or apparently not after I poked around in the game's files, as the game uses a modern fork of it, but the point still stands as the engine itself uses a nearly decade old Blender)[/i].
Now for complaints that isn't tied to the features itselves. The audio design is kinda... empty, as there was moments I expected a sound to play with certain actions in the game, but nothing plays. Somehow Cinnamon City was bugged for me, [spoiler]couldn't tell whenever the the giant ass Bee was "active" or not as somehow he stuck with red eyes all the time, but thankfully stopped at the last part of the dark world,[/spoiler] not really a complaint but I'm not passing the opportunity to voice my experiences. The [spoiler]World Eater of Hyper Heights was perhaps my least pleasant part of my experience, I had no idea where the rocket was at, it was too dark to see properly, I died trying to scale slopes, then I took a break in the hub world exiting off, only to learn that the game still drops you into the level again if you died, and finally I just gave up and let the World Eater do its namesake.[/spoiler] The return to [spoiler]Fern Fields was pretty nice, the entire area was atmospheric and calming for me, but definitely time-consuming flying around, wished we got a variant of the wings with faster flying speed. The land turning into a goliath after collecting all gearboxes was a surprise, wished it was more of a proper boss fight as it kinda just... gives up after a few swats.[/spoiler]
If I have to give a rating for this, it have to be a [b]8.5/10[/b]. It's clear that there was a lot of love and effort put into this, even if it is still rough around the edges after the final update, and has some missed opportunities to use some features even more, like in bonus levels!
Overall, if you want a retro-styled platformer collectathon with the horror elements actually being in-universe this time around, I can't recommend [b]A Happy Place[/b] enough. I'm looking forward to whatever the dev brings next, and hopefully has moved on from using Blender Game Engine [i](or at least use a more updated one)[/i], so that he doesn't have to compromise his vision.
