HEKTOR

SHORT BUT SCARY!

Have you heard about this indie horror game called Hektor from Swedish developer Rubycone? - No! Then it's about time! I visited a friend last weekend and - as always - we were scrolling through the Steam library to find some game to play, when we found this horror jewel in the list. Released about a month ago the game is still pretty new, so I guess you might have missed it as well...


You know I am a great fan of horror and survival games and that I get disappointed most of the times. Not in this case - or at least not too much! There is so much cool stuff about this game that I actually recommend you stop reading now and just trust me to play it. I will do my best not to spoil a lot, but honestly I don't know how to do that in this case...

Hektor is very different from many other games at its very core; most noticeably, the game doesn't put you in a fixed or rather static environment. This is something we figured out very late in the game and I think something crucial to the whole experience. You see, in Hektor everything around you constantly changes... most definitely when you die! - but can you die in Hektor at all? I don't know. Well, not in the classical sense for sure. There's no reloading, no saving, no checkpoints - at least not for you to actively notice. You just play the game and then something happens; yes, you might get "killed" but then you will just wake up in a totally different place (kind of reminds me about what is going on in Uncanny Valley). You never have to repeat something you already did and you never feel bored running around the same routes over and over. You are just "there" and the world around you seems to have no rules or distinct patterns. True, most of the times you feel lost but as mentioned before, I think that is all part of the experience and yet somehow the game intuitively always pulls you into the right direction.

The music as well as the effects in this game are definitely amongst the best I've come to known from this genre before. Just the sound in the background made me freak out countless times although nothing actually happened in the game! The optics of the game are great in my opinion although it can be argued that the constant blur and hallucinogenic fisheye vision can be annoying and is a bit over the top. There are some pills in the game but if you ask me, they never seemed to have any effect. - Maybe they should? Maybe that's a small bug? I don't know, but I think it would be great if they restored the vision to a somewhat normal state.


I like most that this game keeps it as simple as possible. It's the almost classic "amnesian" approach all over again: Only a few items, manually opening doors and moving stuff, mostly focused on light sources, and so on... but even better in my opinion; in Hektor you don't have a monster that has its (more or less) fixed routes and gives you constantly a hard time just running and hiding. - Well, there is something like that in the game but... it's just too hard to explain - which is probably even better that way. Like I raised before; can you really die in this game? Something I have to emphasize greatly is that this game did a perfect job with the notes you can find: First of all there aren't too many and even more importantly ALL OF THEM are read to you!! - Man I wish all the other 1st-person horror clones would do it like that. - If you can't tell a story without a million letters to find, then at least have the decency to get a voice actor and let them be read to the players!
What disappointed me the most was that the ending wasn't at all what I expected. Just: "What? Now it's over? But what about...? And...?". I guess I am leaning out of the window here, but maybe the game has multiple endings or I missed something? It wouldn't surprise me. Either way, what I experienced was unfortunately rather unsatisfying to say the least. There was just nothing... all that build-up for... nothing - and that's how I left the game. It's not that I expected UFOs or whatnot, but something that would explain - well,... something.

Doesn't matter... playing the game was a really great and horrific experience. The developers made the monsters more or less right and scary, the atmosphere was great, the music added-up significantly and personally I felt a bit like really losing my mind over this crazy conception of a world without patterns. Yeah, the game was also short - really short, with about three hours of playtime. But then again, also that can be good sometimes; sometimes - like on this last evening - we would rather play something that can be finished on one evening instead of a whole night or several session, for which we anyway barely have the time.


Hektor is a great mixture of the better parts from games like Amnesia, Outlast and probably The Stanley Parable and I am pretty sure they even stole some curtains from the set of a David Lynch movie. Don't wait, check it out!

Play more! Freak more!