Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure

Review

Lord Moebius has a lot of virtues; he is fit as a fiddle, possesses a large number of lands in his kingdom and abroad, and his chests are full of gold coins. But Lord Moebius hasn’t found love, and every single lady in his kingdom is glowing with beauty in the hope of stealing his heart and becoming his wife. Someone did just that when he was on a trip abroad! Her name was Lorelei and they shared a deep love; so deep that people within Lord Moebius’ palace felt greatly threatened and started investigating Lorelei. Soon afterwards, she disappeared without a trace! Desperate to see her again, Lord Moebius used a powerful hallucinogen to project his memory into reality in order to see her. But memory is not reality and plenty of things can be disrupted. You are about to find out in Hippocampus!

Hippocampus is a third-person action/parkour with puzzles element game developed by Bad Vices Game and published by Valkyrie Initiative on the 21^st of February 2020 on the Steam platform.

If you are looking for a challenging game to play, Hippocampus is one of them. Your goal is to reach a wooden door somewhere within each level to access the next memory (stage).

The first few levels are basically a tutorial, but it will take you a while to pass them, let me tell you. From then on, you’ll have to figure out each stage by yourself. It’s a combination of platforms and puzzles to reach the door at the end of the stage. Moebius can double jump, but in some instances, his destination is out of reach. Look around and see if there is an orb; if there is, try to reach the orb and it will project Moebius up or across the room and he’ll reach a platform or cavity. In some stages, there are big doors made of stones. You can open some of these doors by activating a button on statues made of stone.  You’ll also come across orbs or a white Lorelei which you can acquire and use during a jump (orbs) or to activate a platform (Lorelei).   

 You’ll encounter challenging fights in some of the rooms with these levels, and if you die, you’ll be back to the last wooden door and you’ll have to do it all over again.  But you also die by falling into water and lava, which I have had the pleasure of experiencing.

Initially, Moebius will have a sword and an axe to fight his opponents, but I believe there are other weapons to acquire. Unfortunately, I have not yet managed to acquire another one. In any case, Moebius has a light, heavy and a power attack. The light and heavy will not draw down on your health but the power attack will. If you activate it and leave it on, you’ll die quickly, so you must learn to switch it on and off quickly between power attacks. You’ll also lose a fair bit of health if you get hit by an opponent.  Things become extremely difficult when you are facing two or three enemies with different attack behaviours; you can run and jump around, but dodging is the way to go. Not easy, though! Interestingly, there is no action to block enemy attacks.

You can regenerate some health by chopping off enemies’ limbs or killing them with a well-timed heavy attack.  

I found a few bugs here and there but the one that bothered me the most was when Moebius was too close to a wall and he began to shake. This happened mostly on the moving platforms in a level that took me a while to complete.

The graphics are good, and the level designs are pretty good so far; they are not that big but extremely hard. In terms of controls, you can use the gamepad or your mouse and keyboard. I had a harder time using the gamepad than the mouse and keyboard, as I couldn’t recalibrate the button on my gamepad to suit my gaming style. You’ll be frustrated and might insult your monitor more than once!