Review: Henosis

What we liked!

• Emersion: While playing this game, you somehow start linking your feelings to this lovely little water droplet. Every time you touch something, you jump back. This even went so far, that at a certain moment my girlfriend started wondering if I was playing some horror game.
• Aesthetics and atmosphere: When playing this game, you really get a mystical feeling. Every level has this odd glow with custom artwork, which helps your mind to emerge even further as mentioned in the previous point.
• Obstacles and enemies: Odd Critter Games obviously took their time making this game. Every enemy looks new, in a way I haven’t experienced. Also, the further you traverse into the game the more unique enemies you meet are.
• Boss fights: Don’t be mistaken! It’s not because you don’t have weapons, that you can’t have a boss battle. Your boss battles exist out of a super enemy trying to make you traverse the map without being hit. In my honest opinion, a classic, but well-executed strategy that made me enjoy the switch up between the classic levels.

Somewhere between

• General complexity of the game: Not going to lie here, the game is HARD. And that’s not taking it lightly. It is an amazing challenge, that’s a good thing! The first few levels are quite okay when it comes down to difficulty, but once you progress further, it gets harder in a rapid tempo. So just be ready for it. You will die, a lot. Unless you are born a puzzle god of course!
• Responsiveness of inputs: Not much to say here, but at some points, it just felt that the game had issues reacting to my inputs whilst playing on the keyboard. I pressed the space bar to move my blob, and I just found myself yelling: Come on! I pressed the spacebar! That being said, the rest of the game’s responsiveness, especially during time slow, feels amazing.

What we disliked

• Graphic settings: Well, or more like the lack of graphical options. If you go to the settings tab in Henosis, you are greeted with a soul option to change the volume of the music and sounds. That’s it! NOTHING else… You can’t put the game on windowed or change resolution, which was putting unneeded stress on my PC. Every time I opened up the game on my ultrawide, it would auto rescale every other screen I hade open. So, what I would be watching a video on my second display? It would just resize it. I gave it a shot to actually try to link it to OBS to be able to stream this, but it was just a big hurdle.
• PC controls: On the store page, you are told this game just has “full controller support”. But if you read further down, you find that while it is possible to leverage a keyboard, player manoeuvrability does require a fair bit of accuracy so we recommend that you use an Xbox Controller or similar model instead. But damn did this feel close to impossible. I have played a few levels with a controller, must say it felt great, you get precise aim, fast and slow turning. If you then go to mouse and keyboard… Well, keyboard, since the mouse has no function, it felt like you just moved to slow or too fast, and there is no in-between. Also, the aim where you stop to turn can not be adjusted.