Holiday Card: Hade

At some point I stopped being able to do more card grinding games and moved onto actually playing games again. But Hade, Hade was the last of them. And Hade was a pretty good game to end on.

There isn't a great deal I can say about Hade, much of it is visually obvious. Hade is a single screen at a time puzzle game about bouncing 1 or more balls around a map to collect "hints". This might have common ground with other puzzle games, but I must admit I don't really have a lot of puzzle experience. Every couple of levels, Hade spins up the difficulty, and then settles back down as it introduces new mechanics. I got through maybe a quarter of the game and saw a good 10~ or so different mechanics in action, which would then generally build up to combining them together before adding something new and building back up once again.

The mechanics range simple directional changes, to pad that change direction depending on how you approach, to barriers, to one shot versions of all of this and extensions on the nature of several of these. There's a lot of variety. A couple of the levels do feel rather similar to earlier ones, but usually it feels like you're re-doing the earlier map with a more complex set of mechanics at your disposal.

Visually Hade is extremely simple. The audio cues are good, and the music track is a somber, gentle affair sort of going on the background. There's not a ton to say here, it's a simple puzzle game. I would recommend a 144hz VA panel for it, though. You really want those inky blacks. Yeah, buy a $300 monitor to play a $3 game.

What Hade does well, and what kept me playing far longer than any recent puzzle game I can bring to mind, is the fact Hade does not waste time. You open the game, navigate two menus to a puzzle, and then you're playing the puzzle. If you screw up, you reset with a click, you start with a click, everything is smooth and brisk. It's totally laser focused on puzzle action without any baggage dragging you down around it. I really found myself appreciating that, but ultimately, I started to dread the 'upswing' in the difficulty curve. You'd get a new mechanic and slam through three puzzles, then it started to get hard again. There's a great ah-ha moment, but it started to take me longer and longer.

Ultimately, I'm just not that big on puzzle games. Would I recommend Hade to people who like puzzle games? I want to say yes, but I might be wrong in that. I liked it, though.