Hylics are on the lowest rung of the Gnostic ladder. They’re people who, like most of us, are irrevocably tethered to the nasty, evil material world. I’m not sure if knowing that helps one to understand this game.
Hylics, the game, absolutely flabbergasted me—in the best way possible. As soon as I stepped into Mason Lindroth’s world, there was just so much beauty coiling and pulsing around my horned avatar. As I started walking around town, I was overwhelmed with the need to see it all, explore everywhere, and try to touch everything. I recognized this as a feeling I’d had before when diving into a new RPG, but here it was intensified. I had never seen anything like this world in any RPG before.
As I played, I began to recognize the existence of the traditional RPG systems. I could knock over trash cans and sometimes find an item. I could buy and sell things. I could equip weapons and armor (my first armor was toilet paper). Later, I would engage in turn-based combat, sometimes against entities that might be described as bosses.
Hylics has all those usual RPG things, like a world map, towns, an inventory, and combat. But it’s like an RPG that came from another dimension. Everything is projected through the lens of Lindroth’s vision. You may know Lindroth’s incredible art from his Ludum Dare games, but in Hylics, it’s more dense, intricate, and imaginative than ever.
Mason Lindroth pulls from Surrealism, Absurdism, and Dada to construct Hylics. It has a story, but it feels like it’s been translated from an alien epic poem that was transmitted via dream. In fact, much of the game’s narration and dialogue is randomly generated word-salad. The events are those of almost any RPG ever: You explore, get better equipment, fight gradually tougher foes, and so on. That template is my tether to reality as I dive deeper into the playable hallucination that is Hylics. I have to see every twisting, face-melting inch of it.
Hylics is $3 and is available for Windows only.
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