Platform: Xbox One Xbox Series X
Publisher: QUByte Interactive
Developer: Spaceboy
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: T
If you were going by screenshots alone, Hannah might seem like a must-play game. It’s a 3D puzzle-platformer with a spooky atmosphere and creepy visuals, which are exactly the kind of descriptors you want for a horror game.
Unfortunately for Hannah, games are obviously much more than a series of still images. They have to move. Your camera has to move. Your characters have to move. And that’s where everything kind of falls apart.
The most obvious issue is that controlling the camera is a huge chore. Despite the fact that Hannah is a 3D platformer, you don’t have full control of the camera. Rather, you have a few different camera distance options to choose from, and you occasionally get to tilt the camera slightly in one direction or another. As a result, it’s very easy to miss ledges, and enemies, and all kinds of other things that can kill you. It also makes it easy to misjudge jumps, and to get trapped behind environments, and generally to explore the world in the way that the game wants you to explore it.
On a related note, the lousy camera also means the controls aren’t particularly fun either. I mean, they generally work as they should, but because you spend so much time struggling to see what you’re doing it makes it a lot harder to appreciate that fact. If this seems like a contradiction, it’s not – like, I liked that when I could see where I was going, it was easy to jump from one platform to another, even if those platforms were moving. By contrast, when I’d fallen through an unseen gap and was stuck in a random flight of stairs, it didn’t matter that I could jump up and down when I couldn’t go anywhere else.
Mind you, this speaks to the other part of the problem, which is that Hannah’s graphics left a lot to be desired. Again, they looked fine any time you weren’t moving, but I found the illusion wore off as soon as I set off on the adventure. In motion, even on less-demanding settings, even on a PC that easily surpassed the recommended settings, everything looked kind of blurry and janky, for lack of a better term, completely spoiling the illusion.
Which is unfortunate, because if Hannah looked as good in action as it did in its screenshots, it’s not hard to imagine it becoming at least a cult hit. Instead, we just have a 3D platformer that’s not as scary as it wants or needs to be, which isn’t what anyone needs.
QUByte Interactive provided us with a Hannah PC code for review purposes.
