Henry the Hamster Handler

Genre: Puzzle / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Henry the Hamster Handler is a game that fits in somewhere between the Puzzle and Arcade genres. The premise is fairly straightforward – each level is a gauntlet of sorts that a series of hamsters are released into, and the player is tasked with pressing corresponding buttons when a hamster approaches a hazard. Press the button in a timely manner and the hamster will move on, fail and the hamster will be eliminated. This is a task that grows increasingly complicated as more hamsters are released into the level at the same time.

The gameplay is simple here, and I really felt like there was potential here for something more interesting – this kind of setup could make for a really amazing music-rhythm game if it were taken in that direction. It has the whole “Simon says” button-press thing, and if the Hamsters were released at varying intervals in time with music, this could have been something really interesting… but that’s just not the game we have here.

Rather, the gameplay just ends up feeling rote and dull. You could probably play it fine without even looking at the screen, just pressing the buttons you’re instructed to at the audio prompts. Frustratingly, you’ll spend a sizeable of your time playing this game just waiting for a hamster to get to the next hazard so you can shut it off, especially toward the beginning and end of a level when there are few hamsters left on-screen.

The presentation doesn’t do this game any favors here either. While I appreciate that there are audio cues for the different buttons, the visuals are simple and unappealing, and the music is completely forgettable.

I was really frustrated by Henry the Hamster Handler, because I saw in it the seeds of an idea that could have been really interesting if it was developed into something more. But as it is, it’s a basic “Simon Says”-style game that looks cheap, with tedious, disposable gameplay.

tl;dr – Henry the Hamster Handler has you pressing buttons at prompts much like Simon Says, to keep hamsters safe as they pass through various death traps. There was potential here for something really interesting, but that potential is never realized, with this game just being a tedious slog with a terrible presentation.

Grade: C-

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