Over the many years that Giant Bomb's been covering E3 (or the Keighley-based substitute, I Can't Believe It's Not E3) my fellow moderator and stats nerd Marino has been tracking how often certain regulars have been appearing in the post-conference evening interviews, seen here with his "GB@Nite 5 Timer's Club" forum thread. I've been half-tempted to do the same with frequently-appearing developers on IGotW and associated Indie deep-dive features of mine, because this will be the sixth time by my reckoning I've talked about whimsical Czech developers Amanita Design. The studio has cornered the market on what I tend to call "point-and-click activity centers" where any impetus behind the puzzle-solving comes from pure experimentation, poking around to see what ticks and what seems to have any lasting effect beyond making some chipper little guy appear for but a moment. They've dabbled in more traditional adventure games in the past too, including Creaks and Machinarium, but most of their output tends to be of the "click around and find out" model. Along with appearances in other Indie features of mine they've been IGotW subjects twice before—#40 covered Samorost 3 while #132 looked at Chuchel—but this week's Happy Game sees them take a (slight, admittedly) tonal shift into pure existential horror.

To describe what's actually happening in Happy Game would be fruitless, first because the game runs on literal dream (or nightmare) logic and second because the element of surprise is one of Amanita's most frequently-utilized secret weapons, but broadly speaking the protagonist is a young child who gets sucked into lucid nightmare worlds while sleeping by some enigmatic shadowy entity with a smiling face. Each nightmare eventually culminates in the search for a precious item the boy has lost—toys at first, and eventually a pet dog—but naturally the denizens of those spaces aren't willing to give up their prizes that easily. Collected into three sets (or three nightmares) of loose vignettes that involve solving environmental puzzles with just the mouse cursor (though you can also use WASD for movement), the game's pretty short but does all it can in its brief span to unnerve you with twisted imagery and a form of jumpscare that isn't so much about startling its players with sudden images and sounds but rather the suspense that comes from knowing that anything you click on could lead to something eerie or disturbing suddenly showing up. Whereas in a game like Botanicula some cute little bug guy could crawl out of a tree stump after you probe it, here it could well be a severed head or some grinning demon with blood pouring out of every orifice. It's never too horrific or gory—Amanita's style isn't really to be too graphic or present anything that too closely resembles real violence—but it's a thematically intriguing subversion of a delivery method typically employed for harmless whimsy.

You might think from that description of the gameplay that the game boils down to pure trial and error. To its credit, many of Happy Game's puzzle sequences require a little more thought behind it and because the game lacks dialogue and direction of any kind (barring a few icons that might describe a certain action that you might not otherwise know was applicable) every puzzle can be sussed out intuitively through a combination of clicking and dragging the mouse on objects, though it might not be as simple as doing either just the one time. A typical example of a puzzle is where you're suddenly dropped into a soccer match and have to lift and drop a fallen player next to the ball so they'll kick it (and trip themselves up in the process). The goal is, well, to score a goal: this means taking down the keeper first, which you do by dropping the player near the ball and kicking it until it's close to the keeper—but not so close that the keeper can pick it up and toss it away—and then put the player far enough away from the ball that he runs up to it and kicks it at high speed, damaging the keeper. Once you get those early cracks, you know it's a "rule of three" situation and the puzzle is solved in all but fact: some very simple rules behind it but not something that is immediately obvious without a bit of experimentation and observation. If you've played an Amanita Design game before you'll probably recognize this type of puzzle as something of a trademark of theirs.

While Happy Game does find a lot of new material by switching to horror much of its core is still the same Amanita experience you've probably seen half a dozen times already if you've been following them from their browser game days; I've certainly reviewed about that many by now. That combined with its short length means it's not that much more evolved from, say, Samorost 2 which was the first big game of theirs released all the way back in 2005 (which, and it hurts me to write this as much as it hurts you to read it, was almost 20 years ago). Truth be told, Amanita's worlds have always had a slight uncanny feeling to them, based as they are on Slavic folklore and what feel like middle-school notebook doodles, which makes this more overt shift to horror almost feel kind of redundant. I can't really bash Happy Game for being "too Amanita" much like how I couldn't hate on a Wes Anderson movie for being too Wes Anderson-y; there's a certain presentational style they've nurtured over the years and are loath to step away from, and though you run the risk of creating something that feels very familiar to what came before there's also another audience that's all for jumping back into one of those eccentric and detailed worlds whenever a new one should arrive because there's no-one else making them on that level. Kind of like having a favorite returning vacation spot, in a sense.

Anyway, I thought Happy Game was kinda neat if a little paper-thin which is more or less how I feel towards the entire Amanita oeuvre: they've found their niche and it remains a subgenre within a subgenre of the Indie adventure game market that few others feel like exploring, so all the more reason for them to keep plugging away at games that can incorporate whatever ideas pop into their heads for puzzles custom-made for that format. I feel the same way about Amanita's output that I do with game series like The Room too: I might not ever have it in me to mainline a series like that in one go given how repetitive those games may feel when played back-to-back, but they're always something I'm eager to revisit given enough time between iterations and when the right mood strikes. Just know going into Happy Game that, the atypical horror angle aside, there's not a whole lot that's different from Amanita's usual formula.

Rating: 4 out of 5.