Quick Thoughts On: Hamlet
Hamlet (or “the Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement”, which is likely one of the worst video game titles ever conceived), is a point in click adventure game loosely inspired by Shakespeare's classic play of the same name. Its goal is clearly to lend a more comedic angle to the tragedy, but the result is something that comes off as both underbaked, and exceedingly dumb. Aside from a few characters sharing names from Shakespeare's original Hamlet, and a few key parallel plot points, Hamlet the game is basically an entirely different, less involved story that on the whole is rather irrelevant and constrained to a few brief between act cutscenes.
The rest of the game is a pure single screen adventure game, by which I mean every puzzle is contained within the one screen of the game it takes place on with no collecting of objects or backtracking of any sort. This isn’t an awful way to construct your puzzles as it makes it impossible to get lost or overwhelmed by having everything right in front of you at all times, but it also creates a very constricting spectrum of the sorts of puzzles you can create. Or at least that’s the case with Hamlet, whose puzzles range from tedious obscurity, frustrating clicking exercises, or downright stupidity. They aren’t challenging in any clever way, and mearily stand as obstacles between you and the next screen.
And this is Hamlet’s ultimate issue: nothing in the game is smart, well designed, or the tiniest bit fun. It took me an hour and a half to complete and not once did I feel anything less than complacent boredom as I mundanely made my way through the game hoping it would soon be over, which thankfully was a wish soon answered.
"Quick Thoughts" is a subset of my normal reviews for smaller games which might not fit into a full review but I still have something to say about.