Hyperdrive Inn Reviews

Random purchase, still playing it. Very nice puzzle game with good looking art style.

Very unique game that plays perfectly on the game pad. The art is very stylish and I never saw something like that before, even if I would have wished for more animations. The riddles are sometimes easy sometimes hard. Surely a good game for an adventure fan!

Hyperdrive Inn is an excellent adventure game with point-and-click, puzzle adventure and narrative adventure elements. It's a collection of magical realism vignettes with highly stylized graphics using cutout-style shapes and animations. The textures for the characters and objects are created from scanned fabric swatches. It's well-written and quite funny. It has some pop culture references but fortunately not too many (I think most of the time all that pop culture references do is ruining the worldbuilding). HI has some similarities to Kentucky Route Zero, although HI doesn't have such elaborate character stories and leans more into the purely fantastical. HI's general tone is different too -- it's more quirky, and it has a combination of bizarre, amusing and sometimes grim that does resemble certain other Finnish games which are mentioned in HI (I'm surprised it doesn't mention Control). You won't see all the levels in one playthrough; my estimate is that approximately one third of the levels will be new on the second playthrough. There are alternate solutions for some puzzles and also alternate decisions and dialog choices in some levels. Also, some interactions may go differently depending on which levels you've already visited. I didn't quite like the 2D graphics in the closeups because they don't match the look of the rest of the game and because the faces look somewhat strange. The running animation for the main character also looks a bit strange because the movements look like running at full speed but the character doesn't move nearly as fast, so the impression is of someone running underwater. I think it would have been nice to have a zoom function to be able to see the whole scene. The game has simple inventory puzzles and slightly more tricky logic puzzles. Some of the puzzles where we need to input some information into terminals are very nice, at first making it look like we're not given enough information to solve the puzzle. The puzzles involving mechanisms are a bit of a mixed bag: sometimes a machine works according to some simple and logical rules and we just need to figure out the logic, but sometimes a device is too illogical and contrived (and, of course, accompanied by illogical and contrived hints). Sometimes the game expects us to remember some facts or look them up on the (real-world) Internet. The game is a bit uneven with its hints. Sometimes we get several successive hints and then the solution to a puzzle when repeatedly examining an item, sometimes we get no hints at all for a rather tricky puzzle. Some puzzles require too many clicks, especially those that involve using terminals. Also it sometimes takes too many clicks to get through a dialog line by line. An option to make the text appear immediately would be quite useful, especially when rereading a dialog. The last line of text can get skipped if I press a button before the line is fully displayed. There is no scrollbar in dialogs, and very long dialog lines can go partially offscreen. Also it's a bit inconvenient that there is no way to examine an inventory item if I'm standing over a hotspot.