Hyperdrive Inn

I had the pleasure of interviewing the dev for this game. Loved the concept and the fact that assets are made using fabric. While I am only a few hours in the game, this seems to be really interesting even from the early game. A few pros and cons: Pros - Well crafted assets from fabric. - Intriguing narrative surrounding an infinite hotel which leads to all kinds of possibilities. - Your new game can have you start in a different room meaning no two playthroughs will be the same. Cons - Only one save file. Previous file will be erased when starting a new game. - Dialogue can be a bit bloated at times leading to some long winded conversations. - No ability to check a conversation log leading to you really pay attention to crucial dialogue to solve puzzles Despite the cons, I do recommend this game for anyone seeking for a narrative driven puzzle adventure game with impressive art and well thought out level structure. Congrats on the release and I hope people give this a shot!

Adventure game with random levels that encourage several playthroughs. Hyperdrive Inn is a hotel and the center of the universe. The hotel is also your father’s creation, who has now gone missing. His last message was to call you to the hotel. Which is very strange because you two didn’t talk for many years due to dad’s focus on his work. It turns out something happened in the hotel that threatens the fate of the entire universe, and now you have to fix it. Although it looks like a platformer, this is actually an adventure game. Instead of moving the mouse around the screen and looking for hotspots, you need to walk left or right to find them. When you get close to something interesting, there will be a big icon displayed on the screen. It will be either a magnifying glass that means you will examine something, or a cog that means some action, such as using or collecting an item. Items are stored in an inventory you can check out at any time. An inventory is just a list of items and you don’t get to see how they look like, but you can examine them to get new items or unlock new information. Using an item is very simple. You simply move close to a hotspot, open the inventory, and select it. Since the game is better played with a gamepad, the whole process is very fast and straightforward. The game keeps the number of hotspots to a manageable level and doesn’t go too far. However, the solutions are mostly based on information. What I mean by this is that a hotspot will become useful only after you learn the required information. Same goes for items and readable material. As you can guess, this involves a lot of backtracking and testing if a new interaction is unlocked. You will go through various situations and locations, and the goal in each is to locate the door that will take you to another “room”. Because the hotel is connected to everything, you never know what is behind the door. It may be a single room or a whole new building, a universe where workers must achieve subscription requirements, or two space captains squabbling over an arcade machine. The next stage is chosen at random, and there may even be optional rooms, which encourages a second or third playthrough. Puzzles are a mixed bag. Almost all require you to have the necessary information before it can be solved. For instance, you have to find the right temperature and air conditioner settings to make a bear fall asleep. And as already mentioned, there’s a lot of backtracking, such as the worker stage where you have to visit people in the right order. But some simply don’t work due to lack of accessibility features. One involves masks in different colors: you get a few riddles on which to choose, but colors are too similar and allow more answers than one.

For any adventure game fan, this one’s a gem. The graphics are unique and look nice, and the soundtrack really pulls you into the world. The game has that classic adventure vibe: exploring, solving puzzles, and uncovering a pretty interesting story. I was surprised at how long it was, and there’s even some replay value if you want to dig a little deeper and find out all the secrets. Definitely worth a play if you’re into this genre!

Hyperdrive Inn is an excellent adventure game with point-and-click, puzzle adventure and narrative adventure elements. It's a collection of magical-realism vignettes with highly stylized graphics using cutout-style shapes and animations. The textures for the characters and objects were created from scanned fabric swatches. The game is well written and quite funny. It has some pop-culture references but fortunately not too many. The general quirky tone with a combination of bizarre, amusing and sometimes grim does resemble certain other Finnish games mentioned in HI (I'm surprised there is no mention of Control). Non-essential vignettes/levels are chosen at random, and one playthrough won't include all the levels. HI doesn't have any kind of a New Game Plus mode which would pick unvisited levels, so there isn't any easy way to play through all the vignettes. There are alternate solutions for some puzzles and also alternate decisions and dialog choices in some levels. Some interactions may go differently depending on which stages have already been visited. I didn't quite like the 2D graphics in the close-ups. The running animation for the main character with its unintentional slow-motion effect also looks somewhat strange. The game has simple inventory puzzles and slightly more tricky logic puzzles. Some of the puzzles where we need to interact with terminals are very nice, at first making it look like we're not given enough information to solve the puzzle. The puzzles involving mechanisms are a mixed bag: sometimes a machine works according to simple and logical rules and we just need to figure out the logic, but sometimes a device is too illogical and contrived and is accompanied by equally contrived clues. Occasionally, the game expects us to remember some facts or look them up on the (real-world) Internet. The game is a bit uneven with its hints. Sometimes we get several successive hints and then the solution to a puzzle just when repeatedly examining an item, and sometimes we get no hints at all for a rather tricky puzzle. Some parts of the UI could be improved. Some puzzles require too many "clicks", especially those that involve using terminals. It can take too many clicks to go through a dialog line by line; an option to make the text appear immediately would be quite useful, especially when rereading a dialog. The last line of text can get skipped if a button is pressed before the line is fully displayed. There is no scrollbar in dialogs, and very long dialog lines can go partially offscreen. It would have been nice to have a zoom function to be able to see the whole level. Also it's a bit inconvenient that there is no way to examine an inventory item when standing over a hotspot.

Random purchase, still playing it. Very nice puzzle game with good looking art style.

Very unique game that plays perfectly on the game pad. The art is very stylish and I never saw something like that before, even if I would have wished for more animations. The riddles are sometimes easy sometimes hard. Surely a good game for an adventure fan!

The praise: - unique visual style - some of the puzzles are very challenging - a whole lot of levels The nag: The idea of randomized levels sounded interesting but after completing I though what's the point? It's more like a gimmick. Why not just lay all the levels out there, maybe just randomize their order? First run took me almost 19h and I definitely want to see everything - but since it's randomized I must also play the levels I already know and god knows if and when I encounter the missing levels. Even the protagonist looks randomized patchwork: blue eyed, red headed and dark skinned. Music was annoying, first level happened to be the lobby and I thought the metronome ticking was made by those broken elevators, but nope it was the music, and it never got any better, just metronome ticking ticking ticking. And because there's practically no other audio I resorted to mute the thing and played some chill ambient in the background. Dialog also becomes tiresome very fast after you notice the rate at which Aino says "what the hell is this/what the hell is that/where the hell am I?". I'd be more interested for small clues of what to do or what I'm doing wrong. Now it's just generic unhelpful "I must be doing something wrong" - well yeah, nudge me to correct direction please. And ffs the puzzles that require text input... The virtual keyboard is straight from the 90s and even then BACKSPACE existed. So imagine there's a text parser puzzle which has zero mercy and zero synonyms. You navigate with a d-pad in the keyboard layout that was designed to be slow as possible, and you accidentally enter one wrong character. You can't delete that one character, you can only enter the misspelled word, fail and start over, OR clear the text - and star over. OR exit - and start over. Pick your poison.

A highly original and extensive puzzle adventure with dark humour and quirky puzzles. It took me a while to get used to the interface (played on PC), but the game got more and more rewarding when you delved deeper into the story, the imaginative world and cracked new puzzles.