Welcome to Hanwell

Genre: First-Person Open-World Graphic Adventure / Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

Welcome to Hanwell is a First-Person Open-World Graphic Adventure Horror game released on PC in 2017, then ported to PlayStation 4 in 2018, and then to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game has players waking up in a partially-destroyed secret laboratory spattered with blood, and soon after come to find that you are in the abandoned town of Hanwell, which is stalked by monsters. To escape, you must search for parts of an identification card that a mad scientist spread throughout the town.

I’ll start by saying that the first few opening areas of the game have some serious problems. The laboratory area acts as a tutorial of sorts, getting players acquainted with the basic controls of the game. However, it won’t be long before you encounter your first enemy, a deformed humanoid figure that’s presumably one of the mad scientist’s other test subjects. The problem is, there’s not really any great way to get past him – the opening area forms a loop with a straight path to the exit, there’s not really any good place to hide, you can’t fight back, when he spots you he runs as fast as you do, and if he catches you, you die and restart from a checkpoint. To get out of this area, it seems like you need to just hope that after you die, he respawns at a point that’s not in the way to your next objective.

What’s more, once you get out, the game is trying to direct you to a nearby house on a hill, but the door nearest you doesn’t work and you actually need to enter through a door on the opposite side, where a paved path seems to go in the direction you’re meant to follow, but evidently only leads to another instant-death.

To have these seemingly unavoidable instant-death issues crop up in the game’s opening tutorial area is really frustrating, and it’s a shame because it makes it harder to be enthusiastic about the main game itself, which is another story entirely.

Once you get past those opening foibles, you start to see that Welcome to Hanwell is separated into two types of areas, indoor and outdoor areas. Outdoors within the Open-World environment of the wall-enclosed town is not a very large Open World, but big enough to have plenty of places to explore if you felt so inclined, though mainly the purpose of the outdoor area is just to get from one indoor area to another. In the outdoor area, you can pick up makeshift melee weapons and fight off the occasional enemies you encounter, occasionally consulting a map to figure out how to get to where you want to go.

Indoors, on the other hand, you are not allowed to carry weapons, which is a bit odd since there’s no one to stop you. Anyway, because of this, your searching indoors for helpful items to progress will be balanced with a need to watch for enemies that you can now only avoid.

Welcome to Hanwell definitely shows signs of influence from other games in the Horror genre, like a flashlight with limited batteries, something that makes my eyes roll every time I see it in a Horror game. However, the strongest inspiration here is clearly the Silent Hill series, as early on you get a helpful monster detector in the form of a radio that makes noise when enemies are near. What’s more, Hanwell can get quite foggy…

On that note, the presentation in Welcome to Hanwell is pretty good, with a lot of environmental detail, good textures, good lighting, and even different weather effects, joined by moody music that works well for the Horror genre, as well as voiced recordings of characters you hear via tape recorders and answering machine messages. However, there is one major caveat to the overall good presentation – this game has some pretty bad aliasing, and the edges of objects can look really messy as a result.

Overall, I think Welcome to Hanwell has some really good qualities, works well as a Horror game, and the Open World layout of the game does a good job of setting the game apart within the genre. That said, the opening here is pretty terrible, and just overall this is a game that makes some questionable and at times outright poor design choices. Still, if you’re a Horror fan, this may be worth checking out.

tl;dr – Welcome to Hanwell is a First-Person Open-World Graphic Adventure Horror game where players awaken in an abandoned town filled with mutated humanoid creatures, and must explore the town to find what they need to escape. The presentation here is pretty good, and the Open-World elements make for a fairly unique game within the genre, but there are some poor design choices, particularly in the game’s opening. However, Horror fans may still want to give this one a look.

Grade: C+

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