Grade: C-
A glowing hatchling has to climb but the sun is lava.
I was looking for something lightweight and pretty straightforward out of the bundle and landed on this game “Hatch.” You start the game as a bit of person in an egg, and then you (wait for it….) Hatch. Your goal as a tiny shiny alien humanoid in this strange landscape is to get to the top of the tower. However, the catch is that if you spend too much time in the sun, you’ll fizzle and burn and die. You see other tiny hatchlings on the ground along the way that didn’t succeed, and you’re hoping to avoid their fate.
Completely subjective feeling of nausea
As I was first playing Hatch, I was enjoying myself. I was jumping around, platforming, climbing a massive tower that stretched beyond sight, navigating while avoiding the sun at all times. But soon, I started to feel a bit queasy. Then, I felt nauseous. Something about the ambiance gave me severe vertigo. My palms got sweaty, my head felt light, and that was the stopping point for me.
When you step into the sun, there’s like a sickening crackling noise, and the screen does a fuzzy thing. Something about that sound/animation combo is what I think did me in.
I watched a playthrough and got to see the crazy platforming challenges at the end. Kudos to those players who succeeded where I could not. It was way more fun watching someone else play this game than if I were playing it myself.
It’s probably not fair to rate a game based on my stomach’s violent reaction, but not sure what other criteria could matter more in a rating system than the game making me physically ill. I might have liked this game otherwise.
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