A Deft Little Puzzler That’s Forgotten The Month
When you play a large proportion of indie games that hit the Xbox Store, you begin to see patterns. Sliding puzzles, for one, are common as frozen muck. We’re talking about games where you tap up, down, left or right and keep sliding till you hit a wall. Less common, but still frequent, are games built on coding principles: you queue up commands and then watch them play out.
While these two might be common, as far as we can recall, no-one has attempted to cross those streams. A sliding puzzle where the button-presses are queued up like the sliding character is a robot? Yeah, actually, we can see that working well.
You Should Be Resting, Santa
Ho Ho & Move gives it a good old go go. But let’s point out the elephant in the room first: why is a Christmas-themed game coming out in mid-January? Everybot Games Studio, I’m sorry, but you missed the sleigh with this one. I can only imagine that someone filled out the Xbox form, but accidentally put in US date conventions: “12/01, that will get it out before Christmas”.
Good, we’ve got that out of the way. It was bothering us.
The sliding + coding stuff works pretty well. You get a set number of directional arrows on the left-hand of the screen. On the right, you have the grid. Santa needs to reach his elf (there’s no story to tell you why: perhaps even Santa does a spot of Elf on the Shelf), so you need to slide him through the grid to the elf, catching presents on the way. No gift can be left behind and ALL directional arrows MUST be used.
Placing the arrows is simple enough. Move the cursor to a square and press Y for an up arrow, X for a right arrow, and so on. It might take a little calibration to see the face-buttons as directional arrows, but I got there reasonably quickly.
Press RB and Santa slides from arrow to arrow, and you get that delicious reveal of where you’ve gone wrong. Santa faceplants a snow-drift and you get to place the arrows again.
Our Kingdom For A Reset Button
It’s here, in fact, that we cursed Ho Ho & Move most. Fail, and it wipes all your arrows from the board. All of them. It doesn’t matter if you were one arrow away from perfection: Santa gets revenge for the faceplant and forces you to start all over again. It’s a bewildering choice.
Which stacks on another bewildering choice. There’s no Reset button! Place fifteen arrows but think better of it, and you have to scoot over to every last one manually and press LB to erase them. Ho Ho & Move has no problem with removing all arrows when you don’t want them removed, but doesn’t let you remove all arrows when you do. I’ve never hated Santa more.
We’ve been carrying that enmity for a while, so it’s nice to be unburdened. Ho Ho & Move certainly deserves better, because the puzzles are well done. What surprised us most is where the challenge came from: Ho Ho & Move is less about finding a path to the elf – there’s dozens of ways to get to them – it’s about finding a path that uses up ALL of the arrows. Sometimes, the problem is that you don’t have enough arrows (“how can I reach that last present when I only have one up arrow?”), while on other occasions you have too many. It’s this last limitation that feels unusual: you’re often doing loop-the-loops to use up arrows you don’t want.
Which is quite cool, in all honesty. It’s rare that you’re asked new, different questions in a puzzle game, and Ho Ho & Move does it for the bargain price of £2.49. Being given too many moves is a new one.
Being Santa Is Easy
What Ho Ho & Move doesn’t quite manage to do is have the courage of its convictions. It has a good concept and an unusual question for the player to ponder, but it wimps out from making puzzles that would truly bust the player’s baubles.
On too many occasions, even on the latter levels, we would solve the puzzle on our first try. That’s because Ho Ho & Move gives the player too much help. The presents are clues, as they are a path that must be hit. The levels themselves are clues as they’re often tight constructions that can only be navigated in one direction. But, most annoyingly, there are often wooden signs around the walls of the puzzle, telling you which arrow goes where. That last one hurt our feelings a wee bit. We’re not stupid (at least, not that stupid).
And while having too many arrows sounds good on paper, it can make puzzles too easy. Got too many right arrows? Well, put three right arrows in a row to use them all up. There are occasions where a surplus is a problem, but there are a greater number of occasions where they are not.
The result is a puzzle game that I breezed through. Now, that might not be a problem for you. Casual players might gobble it up like a pint of eggnog. But I was a sliver disappointed. This is a lovely concept that never quite gets pushed to its limits. It felt like there was a lot of game left on the table. I desperately hoped for a New Game+ after completion, but alas.
A Tidy Bargain with Untapped Potential
A neon light in the back of my head is reminding me of the price. I might get wistful and think about what might have been, but this is £2.49. I can’t get on a bus for that amount of money. It’s almost nothing, yet it gets you a tidy, well-thought out puzzle game that also attempts something new. It might even get you thinking it’s Christmas again.
What you won’t get from Ho Ho & Move is frustration. It goes down smooth, and for £2.49 that might be enough to make it one last Christmas present to yourself.
Important Links
Christmas Comes Late As Ho Ho & Move Slides Onto Xbox For Pocket Money – https://www.thexboxhub.com/christmas-comes-late-as-ho-ho-move-slides-onto-xbox-for-pocket-money/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/ho-ho-move/9PGQZFQQ3N4Z/0010
