Hook

Protip: don’t name your indie puzzler after a polarizing 90s Robin Williams flick. People might purchase it under the mistaken belief that you’ll get a chance to avenge Ruffio’s death. Speaking of which, why exactly did they have to kill off Ruffio? What, were the stakes not high enough when Captain Hook had merely kidnapped Peter Pan’s children and had already threatened to kill them? You can’t even say Pan avenged Ruffio. Hell, he tried to give Hook a chance to leave Neverland instead of finishing him off. Hook turned them down, then possibly escaped via a teleportation device hidden inside a giant stuffed crocodile, leaving open the possibility of a sequel. You know, if the movie had actually made money and Spielberg didn’t wrap the shoot hoping that Julia Roberts choked to death on her own malformed ego.

By the way indie game Hook developer, now my review will show up in Google searches for both Hook the movie and Hook the your game. You’re welcome.

Hook is a minimalist puzzler based on reeling in lines and hooks. You press buttons to pull a line. If the line (and any hooks attached to it) have no resistance, they vanish. If they’re not free, you have to start over (about forty odd levels in, they add lives, presumably to cut down on the tedium of making a mistake and starting over). The further along you are, the more convoluted the stages get, eventually requiring you to change the directions of the lines, account for radio-like signal jumps, and so forth. It’s not exactly thrilling stuff, but at least its original and interesting enough that it never becomes a slog. I know this review isn’t exactly overflowing with my usual wit and wisecracks. To which I say, look I have to work with.

See? It looks like IKEA instructions. And really, the only complaint I have is Hook is too damn easy. Lots of puzzle games can be solved by simple reverse-engineering, but Hook takes this to such a fundamentalist level that it feels more like a time waster than something truly built to flex your grey matter. Every next-step you take in Hook is self-evident: simply find the lines that are free to be pulled out and arrange the junctions so that only they are removed, then repeat with newly freed lines. So yeah, Hook is a digital, semi-pretentious art-house version of Pick Up Sticks. But hey, I’m a semi-pretentious indie gaming critic who happens to be unbeatable at Pick Up Sticks so this sort of thing is my bag.

Hook was developed by Maciej Targoni & Wojciech Wasiak
Point of Sale: Steam, Nintendo Switch

$0.99 avoided the boo-box in the making of this review.

Hook is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.