There is no text in the game (its few characters speak in an indecipherable Ur language) so the shape and contours of each puzzle must be felt out, made explicit through prodding and trial. One is hidden in each of the game's large, multi-screen scenes and you must solve the scene's puzzle in order to rescue them. Your snake chums have been scattered and lost throughout Hohokum's opaque world. This is a video game doing something that only a video game can do as it places you inside the landscape of its creators' imagination.įor those for whom these quiet miracles aren't enough, Hohokum has some clearer goals.
No matter that the usual video game clutter is absent from the screen: the score ticker, the map, the inventory, the clutch of lives. Simply flying through these scenes, loop-de-looping overhead, swooping through the trees and rushes, is enough.
Every psychedelic colour complements the next. These painterly hinterlands are filled with Pantone fauna. Meanwhile, the game's palette of colours, shades, shapes and swirls is vast - but meticulously so. There is no map: you must memorise how each scene connects to the next through exploration. As you move through these weird scenes, you create trailing shapes with your tail while, every now and again, you can change things in the environment by butting into them with your head. Hohokum's range of interactions is slim: go fast, go slow, steer. You play Hohokum as a lithe snake known as Long Mover - or, more accurately, as the unblinking eye that sits at the head of the snake, its lingering tail sweeping behind. These are fever-dream vistas - the kind of places you wonder whether you've remembered wrongly, whether you were ever really there at all. Elsewhere, a businessman sits in the belly of a vast and complicated Heath Robinson-esque machine, waiting for bees to drop honey into its pipes which will travel through the tubing and, finally, be deposited in his coffee cup as a steaming drink. In another, an Indian elephant with a deep underbite plods through the jungle while a caged albino orangutan dangles from his tail, praying to be freed. His squat buddy sings full-throated by his side while, overhead, the buckshot stars wink approvingly. In one, a tall violinist plays a melancholic tune while he stands under the throbbing light of a lamppost. Hohokum's scenes are unfamiliar - beguilingly so. This gorgeous interactive dreamscape is brimming with new ideas.
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