Himno

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Himno is a Platformer where you are exploring a stone structure in a dark world looking for glowing cubes and sparkling doors, with a quiet, serene tone running throughout the game.

This game’s visuals look good, with everything bathed in darkness and lit up as you run past torches or grab power-ups, and there definitely feels like there’s some sort of history behind what you’re seeing, though you’re never quite given an indication of what, exactly. This is backed with a quiet soundtrack that matches the serene tone of the game well. Unfortunately, so much of this presentation is repeated over and over again, making it get old quick, but I’ll get to that more in a bit.

You’ll spend this game largely by guiding your sword-wielding protagonist through ruins looking for your next objective. Even though the main character in Himno bears a sword, you’ll never use it. There are no enemies here, no obstacles to overcome, just a series of stone structures to scale, explore, and search for the next objective. It kinda’ makes me wonder just why there’s even a sword in the first place, aside from to mislead potential buyers into thinking this game has some sort of combat in it. Yeah, this isn’t that sort of game.

As for the platforming itself, it’s quite good, and bears some similarity to the core gameplay of Celeste, with players easily bouncing off walls and using an air-dash to get through the various levels. There’s a solid foundation here for a great game to be built on.

Unfortunately, that’s all that’s here. There’s not really any point to the game’s seemingly-randomized levels, which just keep repeating the same motif over and over again to the point where you’ll wonder if you’ve already been here before numerous times. There’s very little of anything to denote progression beyond the scaling level number – the difficulty never seems to increase, and while you gain new abilities from leveling up and collecting temporary power-ups, your core abilities seem perfectly sufficient to explore the game’s levels without too much difficulty (which is good, because slipping and falling into the waters below will force you to restart the whole thing over again).

The entire time I was playing this game, I just kept myself thinking, “what is the point of all this?”. The entire experience was so bland and repetitive, and I just didn’t see any good reason for the game to keep making me run around these samey-looking levels over and over again.

Himno feels so much like wasted potential – it’s good gameplay and a good aesthetic with absolutely nothing built on top of it beyond random, samey-looking levels. I wish that this game had some sort of feeling of progression or something to add variety, because without it I grew bored quickly. Honestly, if you want a platformer that plays like this, you’re much better off getting a game like Celeste.

tl;dr – Himno is a Platformer where you’re exploring a series of dark ruins. The core gameplay and atmosphere in this game is quite good, but the game unfortunately does nothing with those elements, lacking a real challenge and very quickly becoming repetitive and boring. Despite its good qualities, Himno isn’t worth your time.

Grade: C-

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