![]() Besides these odd surges, the difficulty escalation is so gradual that it can be hard to notice it even happening, and it feels incredibly odd to beat the 100th level and learn that you were apparently on Easy mode. You’ll spend level after level with simple rhythms, suddenly hit one with a challenging design, and not see another like it for a good stretch. You’ve seen most of the game before you’ve even really cut your teeth on it.Įven odder, the difficulty climb in Henry the Hamster Handler is incredibly slow and inconsistent. The game has maybe twenty-odd level designs that it will shuffle around as you progress, the only differences on revisits being how it places traps and which kind of traps it throws at you. Henry the Hamster Handler shows you all of its cards early, and eventually you’ll realize that’s not all it exhausts early on. ![]() The only other real notable mechanic outside button pressing is a hamster who shuffles across the screen sometimes to obscure your view, but its effect is minimal due to it appearing at best once per stage. Every trap has one set button tied to it, but the game does not even seem to use the entire Switch controller layout, meaning that there was no reason they couldn’t have added ZL, ZR, L, R, or even the oddly absent Y to the game in later levels to throw in a curveball. The game starts off introducing you to its mechanics fairly quickly, putting all the traps on the table so that there’s nothing for later levels to really add to the level formula. Henry the Hamster Handler boasts of an impressive 300 level count, but as you begin playing it, you’ll see how this high number was achieved. The point quota slowly climbs as you progress, but there is no reason to try and go for a perfect run as the game does not discriminate between a perfect run and barely passing, one of the first signs of Henry the Hamster Handler’s greater issues. If you hit a button at the wrong time, you get docked 1 point from your starting pool of 100, and a hamster death will kick it down ten whole points. You can disable this option if you want to go on visuals alone, but finding the rhythm seems to be the idea behind beating the levels. The button you need to press even drops in from above like its a Dance Dance Revolution arrow lining up with its slot, and there is an audio cue that will tell you in a squeaky hamster voice what button needs to be pressed. As more hamsters enter the fray, it’s very easy to settle into a routine of pressing the buttons in a specific pattern with a consistent pace. The hamsters will enter the level at set intervals, the player needing to press the buttons to toggle traps so that they can continue safely onward. The core of Henry the Hamster Handler is solid enough, although calling it a puzzle game as most sites suggests feels a bit less accurate than saying it’s sort of like a rhythm game but one not set to music. ![]() The hamsters are fairly cute and their potential deaths more like the comical slapstick of Tom and Jerry than something cruel, but the music in the levels and visual backdrops will cycle through arbitrary loops, meaning that the set dressing plays no real role in indicating your progression. ![]() The hamsters will be blindly marching towards things like electrical traps, acid pits, and fire vents that you need to disable, and to avoid spike traps you’ll be called on to inflate hamsters like bubbles or teleport them to different parts of the level. Each trap has its own assigned button to press to deactivate it if it is dangerous or to activate it if it is helpful. Your objective is to make sure enough hamsters make it to the end of the level alive, the little critters moving at their own pace and coming across a few traps along the way. This aspect isn’t shown in-game either, but the goal is still fairly straightforward as you start up the first level. As long as a hamster survives enough near-death experiences, it will gradually change into more precious metals so that it can be melted down into jewelry. In fact, the story of the title is not explained in-game at all, the game’s store page explaining that the player is supposedly involved in the practice of hamster alchemy. The first odd thing you’ll notice about Henry the Hamster Handler is the titular Henry never makes an appearance to handle any hamsters. ![]() While I have no first hand experience with the VR title, a look between the two games makes it very clear that they are surprisingly different, the Switch incarnation clearly having less thought put into its design. However, despite sharing a pretty close name with the Virtual Reality game, porting it to Switch required some changes to match the console’s capabilities. Henry the Hamster Handler for the Switch is the follow up to a VR title all about trying to make a safe path for hamsters through perilous levels, a gameplay style similar to the kind found in games like Lemmings and the Mario vs. ![]()
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