Honk! by Alex Harby
Honk! continues – or starts, depending on the order in which you play the comp games – the theme of light-hearted, superbly implemented puzzly parser games. This time, we’re in a circus. What’s more, we are a clown. We have custard pies that we can throw, balloons that we can blow up, a miniature car that too many people can get into, and of course a nose that we can honk. The only thing we’re missing is a flower that spouts water – though in one memorable simile, the game, taking the protagonist seriously as the focal character through whom we experience the world, tells us that “like water from a flower, the rabbit shoots out of the hat”.
Our little circus is in trouble. There’s someone, a phantom, who is sabotaging the acts. This makes the audience unruly, of course, but it also threatens the identity of the performers. Who’s the strong woman if she can’t lift someone? Who’s the goose trainer if he can’t get his goose to do what he wants? Defeating the phantom requires you to make the acts work again, and making the acts work again is restoring the ability to express their identity to your fellows in the circus. This is not accidental. Honk! has strong queer themes, and it’s overall message is that we should stop the nasty vindictive people who are trying to take away people’s identities. It doesn’t really explore this in any depth, but it gives the story a good kind of coherence.
The other coherence-generating design decision is that all puzzles involve being a clown. That’s right and proper, of course: we need to embrace our own decidedly non-standard identity in order to help others. Honk our nose, make balloons, throw pies, get into the clown car; it’s all necessary, and it’s fun. I found some of the puzzles more intuitive than others, but in general the difficulty level is not extremely high. (I found the goose puzzle highly intuitive and solved it easily, whereas the rabbit puzzle seems to contradict common sense physics and I had to resort to the walkthrough. By the way, I loved the Grim Fandango allusion.)
The final scene is one of those classic ‘now use everything you have learned’ scenes, which are classic because they just work.
(There might be a slight bug there, because in the very turn in which I defeated the baddie, the circus helper announced that the tire of my car was punctured; but I don’t think they were along for the ride? This seems like a case of a missing ‘if’ statement.)
A very sympathetic game that I highly recommend.