Video games, as a medium, have evolved spectacularly over the past few decades. From innocent and simple beginnings, gaming has gone to ever more complex and intricate places over the years. Sometimes, you just end up yearning for a simple puzzle game like the ones you used to get on the old home micros. Well, if you want that, our Honeyland review is probably a great starting point, since this is a puzzle game that honestly couldn’t get much simpler.
What Is Honeyland?
Honeyland is a casual puzzle title where you have to steer a mischievous bear towards a pot of honey by using the correct action cards at the correct moments. Cards will contain an action and a number, such as right arrow 4, which would turn the bear to the right of their current position and have them walk 4 paces. Using these cards, you have to navigate a series of squares on a grid and get the bear to land exactly on the space that contains the honey. If you overshoot but still touch the honey, it doesn’t count.
It’s a strange combination of those simple robots you’d play with in school that would perform a set of actions that you programmed using the buttons on the back with simple and colourful graphics and sound. If you’re thinking this sounds familiar, then you’ve probably not long ago read our review of SokoMage, another incredibly simple puzzle game from the same developer. Assuming you have read the aforementioned review, then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect from this one too.
Simplicity Itself
It probably goes without saying at this stage that Honeyland isn’t particularly interesting. The puzzles are simple, as are the mechanics, and just like SokoMage, it has only 30 levels to get stuck into. All in all, an avid puzzle gamer will have the game completely cleared away in less than an hour, with the only real benefit from the exercise being one of the easiest platinum trophies around if you’re playing on a PlayStation device.
Beyond that, there’s almost nothing to really recommend Honeyland as an enjoyable experience. The puzzles are so simplistic and overplayed that it hardly feels worth bothering with them, and far before I hit the halfway point, I was dying to be done with the game. A larger part of the problem is that there isn’t even anything redeeming about the visuals and music, and there are zero storylines to try and help to carry the boilerplate gameplay.
Visual Torture
The graphics are about as simple as SokoMage’s and yet, somehow, much worse. While the other title is at least well put together and has some enjoyable 2D-pixel art, Honeyland is made in 3D, and the model work is far from top-notch. The little bear character could have been taken from almost any basic 3D modelling pack, and the animations are, at best, stiff and uncomfortable, which is appealing in a ‘terribad’ sort of way for about 30 seconds before you’re fed up with it.
Musically, it’s almost impossible to describe Honeyland. It has a bubbly up-beat thing going for it, from what I can remember, but otherwise leaves so little of an impression that I’m not sure that the game doesn’t just have a white noise soundtrack and relies on the brain of the player to fill in whatever music it thinks would suit the situation best.
The Verdict
While it should be pretty clear already, let’s just spell it out: Honeyland is bland and tasteless. It has cheap animations, cheap graphics, and absolutely zero new or interesting ideas to offer the world of puzzle games. Even if you’ve got fond memories of those ‘pre-programming’ puzzles from your math class back in the day, you’d be better off finding one of those crappy little robots from eBay than wasting your time here.
Developer: AFIL Games
Publisher: AFIL Games
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC
Release Date: 19th October 2020
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Honeyland was provided by the publisher.
