Herman Electro Reviews

Fun puzzle game with interesting mechanics. Art is a bit rough but the rest is good.

Herman electro is a cool game that some friends recommended to me. The trailer and modest art style belie a very captivating and entertaining game worth every dime. The different characters provide a diverse experience for the game—whether you play casually as Herman, creatively as Natasha, or time-strapped and on your toes as June. This is a game I can play again and again without getting bored. I am surprised this game isn't more popular!

[b]That other game.[/b] There used to be a game called "The Castle Doctrine" (TCD), which this game takes much inspiration from, but by adapting the game to a new foundation, solves a lot of the problems of that game. In TCD, the goal was to both create a deadly maze in your home, while venturing out into other players' homes with a limited set of tools to find and exploit a weakness in their maze. Sometimes this meant sawing through a weak wall, or snipping a critical wire that powered their traps. The main problem with TCD though, was its own players. There was very little incentive to create fun puzzles in that game, so most ended up being boring to play, and the game killed itself when people started building impossible puzzles like combination locks. The thing is... when you did find a fun maze, and you did find a weakness in a maze, it was really damn fun. [b]Puzzle-Roguelike foundation[/b] Herman Electro comes disposes of the entire multiplayer element, brings its own twists in the form of being a roguelike, but finds inspiration in the same type of puzzle. It works better. The puzzles are designed to make the player feel smart, and have fun. [b]Gameplay[/b] You play in a world that is very typical of modern roguelikes - you walk around a dungeon with a bunch of rooms, most of which contain a puzzle for you to solve, the world is divided into floors, and the deeper you go, the harder it gets. Most puzzles are designed around exploiting traps by using consumable items that you've gathered by completing other puzzles. The challenge comes managing your usage of those tools. You usually don't want to use too many on a single puzzle. The thing is, floors usually work as one huge puzzle - maybe you spot an exploit in one puzzle but don't have the tool for it, but that tool is a reward for another puzzle on the same floor. There's a lot to think about. The roguelike nature generates different floors from a huge pool of puzzles so the game is different each time you play. The reason I mention this is to point out that the puzzles themselves are hand-crafted (which is a good thing). [b]Presentation[/b] The game's presentation isn't incredible, but if you can immerse yourself in the gameplay (and, in my personal opinion, turn off the music in favor of your own), it's serviceable, and I think the price now reflects that. Although the graphics aren't the most beautiful, they do what is important for a puzzle game and clearly show you what is happening, which is the important bit. [b]Do I recommend?[/b] Absolutely, if you enjoy the random "run based" nature of roguelike games, but want to solve puzzles rather than shooting tears at nightmarish creatures, I highly recommend this. The game used to be priced much higher which made it harder to recommend, but at the current price it is honestly a steal for the amount of content packed into here, if it's your thing.

What an interesting game! The video trailer and game description give a decent overview of some of the main aspects of the gameplay, which involve using (some subset of) your available tools to solve a puzzle in the current room. The large number of tools that each interact with a number of different room elements creates many puzzles that can be solved in multiple ways. And after you get through the tutorial zone and perhaps a few short individual failed runs, you discover that the game is not merely about solving a series of individual room puzzles. It's also a resource-management game, where you must realize when rooms have multiple solutions, and then carefully choose which solution--and thus which set of resources--you want to spend on the current room in order to preserve resources you know you will need in another room. Each floor of the prison contains about 4-10 rooms, with typically enough tool resources to solve those rooms plus a small surplus. The surplus tools might let you continue even after making a mistake, or help you save up to purchase alternative/better tools in the occasional shops or bonus rooms you encounter. Sometimes, to keep your options open, it makes sense to go on to the next floor without solving all the rooms or using all the shops on this floor, planning to return to the prior floor later when you have more (or just different) tool resources to use/spend. The game is roguelike in that when you make a mistake and die, you restart at the beginning of a (new, random) prison. But your unlocks are permanent, so once you unlock a new tool type or a new playable character, you will have that available for all future runs. There is also 'scrap metal' which is a currency you can save across runs to eventually purchase other super-tool unlocks. Anyway, with that said, here's some thoughts about what I liked or disliked in the game so far: GOOD There's a whole lot of content. After 15 hours of play, I've only unlocked 3 of 4 playable characters and still have about a dozen super-tools I've yet to unlock. Though I think I've seen most of the unique room layouts (see below), most individual rooms are still challenging to play as part of the overall run; rooms that are completely understood or trivial are still relatively rare. There is a fun surprise the first time you make it to floor 6, which adds a new layer/twist to the puzzle solving. A successful run typically takes me about 45 minutes, and is constantly challenging... but also I don't feel I need to play completely optimally to succeed (a mistake or two won't necessarily doom a run, though sometimes it will). NEUTRAL While the game is described as a roguelike, the puzzles rooms are not so much randomly generated as just selected from a large finite set of rooms created/curated by the developers, which will sometimes repeat, or appear with minor variations or rotations or reflections. Early on (in the first few hours of gameplay), this may cause you to wonder if you've already seen most of the puzzle room content, but fear not. First, many of the rooms won't appear until you've unlocked a tool (so you won't see any battering-ram rooms until you unlock the battering-ram), so some room layouts only first appear after you progress far enough. Second, even when you find yourself in a familiar room in a subsequent run, you will usually reach it with a different set of resources, and realize e.g. that not only could you solve this room layout with two planks, but you could also solve it with a saw and a brick instead. And then you may see the same room again, only this time you have a flame, or a bomb, which offers a completely different approach to solving the same room. The point is, individual rooms are always puzzles in the context of the current run with the current resource set, and so even after room layouts become familiar, the rooms are still challenging to solve well for the current run. Progress feels a little slow sometimes, but that makes new unlocks also feel very rewarding. You might have a 25 minute run that dies without making any permanent-unlock progress, but then if you play well in the next run and unlock a new item or character it feels great. As with many challenging roguelikes (think Spelunky?) sometimes the only way to discover new mechanics/interactions with newly unlocked elements is to try them out, which often may end in your death. Many mechanics are reasonably intuitive, but you need to be willing to risk the run to learn what pouring a bucket of water across these live wires will do, as the knowledge from the outcome of that experiment (either way) will help you know how to solve puzzles with those elements in the future. There is no undo. There's not really any story/dialogue; this is a game about puzzle mechanics, resource management, planning, and recognition. BAD The game clearly feels 'indie' in a few ways: the art quality is low; there isn't much animation; the sounds are a little weird; the music is borrowed and kind of weird; there is plenty of room for more polish and usability features. (I know the devs are still working on more feature content as well as polish.) If you want a game that looks/sounds/feels great this is maybe not the game for you. This game delivers just enough in those areas to support the core puzzle mechanics. OVERALL I like this game because I don't know any other puzzle game quite like it, and because it is constantly challenging and I seem to keep unlocking new content which adds even more wrinkles/depth to the core gameplay.