I’m piloting a flying ribbon snake with an eye for a head through a colourful dream world. With the controller I can fly up and down, I can loop the loop, and doodle across the skies. I can speed up with a press of a button, my head morphing into an arrow head cutting through the sky and I can slow down with a press of another button, until I appear in a state of floaty stasis. All around the world are floating islands and installations populated by various funny looking characters that whoop and cheer as I soar overhead. Some even start hitching a ride as I fly by, hands in the air as if riding a rollercoaster, surfing the sky without a care in the world. It is GameCity 2013, and I’m playing Hohokum, whilst being flanked by the game’s creators, artist Richard Hogg and developer Ricky Haggett.
“It’s amazing how few video games give you that,” says Richard; “just an unadulterated experience of joy without any stress of failure.” He has a point.
The basic joy of playing video games doesn’t necessarily come from lining up the perfect headshot or ploughing through legions of undead monsters with a chainsaw, as satisfying as those things may be. No, the basic joy of video games comes from the feeling of levity, of defying gravity. You can trace it back to Super Mario - Nintendo have perfected the jumping controls of their icon for almost thirty years now but everywhere in games that feeling of breaking the shackles of gravity is all around you. For me personally, it was the super powered jumps you could perform in Saints Row IV, from that initial surge of energy as you shot from the ground, to the apex of the jump as you arc serenely through the night sky to the sound of Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing before thundering down towards the ground making a massive crater.
There are better, more high brow, examples of course; Jason Killingsworth wrote extensively about the rapture of jumping in Journey, touting it as a highly emotional, near religious experience. Journey was released in 2012 and quickly became the critical darling of the PlayStation 3’s back catalogue. The game’s creators (thatgamecompany) also produced Flower, another game where the only impetus from the player is directing a lone current of wind to pick up flower petals and re-seed the world around you.
As with Journey and Flower, Hohokum has gained similar levels of anticipation, dealing almost exclusively in the joy of flight, with a spoonful of exploration via simple interactions and sweetened by a hypnotic electronic soundtrack. There are traces of Fez in its presentation and structure, but I also can’t help but feel reminiscent of Snake for my Nokia 3210. “He’s actually called the Long Mover,” laughs lead developer Ricky Haggett; “at least, that’s his official name”.
“It’s a playground of wonders and surprises to discover,” enthuses Haggett, perhaps the best introduction you could give. “You fly this character, the Long Mover, who is this long ribbon or thread, a bit like a kite, and you’re very expressive, it almost feels a bit like doodling as you fly through these strange worlds and just seeing what happens when you interact with all the things in it.”
“It’s not a stressful game,” says Richard, who was responsible for all of Hohokum’s hand drawn art. “There’s never any time pressure, you can’t die in the game. We try to avoid things that feel like failure because we want it to be a game that’s not stressful or difficult to play. It’s more about creating a particular mood or escaping.”
Just watching the game being played is enough to lull you into a hypnotic trance. When American talkshow host Conan O’Brien played the game during a segment for his show filmed at E3 2013, he quipped that the game had to be a product of illicit chemical substances, inducing feelings of absolute contentedness. E3 is one of the biggest events in the games industry calendar, an unholy marketing juggernaut where the big studios and developers reveal their slate of releases for the future using made up words like drivatars, levelution and haptic feedback. As Conan went to talk to Sony’s competitor, Microsoft, to talk about the Xbox One, he was given the typical spiel about processing power and graphical fidelity, to which the ex-Simpsons writer was seen to zone out and think about Hohokum. The effect was intended to be funny, but the statement could be seen as a clear sucker punch from Sony to Microsoft.
Usually E3 and these kinds of shows are defined by the big games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. That year Microsoft were pushing Ryse and Dead Rising, two exclusive games to Xbox that both involve a fair amount of disembowelling, yet here they were being countered by a small deliriously happy game about a multicoloured ribbon flying through whimsical dream worlds. “Yeah, E3 was interesting,” recalls Ricky; “it was great meeting Conan, you wouldn’t believe how nice that guy is! But yeah, people came out saying that they could imagine themselves playing for hours, describing it as zen-like.”
It is difficult to understand where Hohokum came from. Games are notoriously difficult to make - a couple of years ago at a prior GameCity I was able to play a working demo of Fez and meet its creator Phil Fish. At the time, I had no idea of the lengths Fish had gone to make the game, which was chronicled in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie. There is an underlying madness to Fez, of course, the lengths you have to go to solve its puzzles and secrets seem to highlight an insanity that as far as game development goes, seems to come with the territory.
“As a console game, we’ve been working on Hohokum since March 2012,” says Ricky. “But before that, we originally showed a very rough demo at the Eurogamer Expo in 2010.” However, Richard adds; “I hope players realise that we had a lot of fun making this game, if they don’t feel that, we will have failed.”
It all comes back to levity then, the game about the flying kite snake spreading a little bit of joy in people’s lives. It can be difficult to see through all the uber-violence and yearly iterations of popular franchises, but video games are changing; everyday they get more nuanced and complex. Hohokum exists as a breath of fresh air, an exercise in simplicity articulating the most basic joys of the medium, not just to feel what it must be like to soar through the skies but how to lighten up the world simply by existing.
Hohokum was released last month for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
Hohokum Site
Conan at E3
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