1. My life is inundated w/ millions of disparate cables which are always in various states of disarray and tanglation. About once I year, I grab all my numerous boxes of knotted cables and sit down w/ a couple more beers than maybe I should drink in one sitting and untangle the lot of them systematically. Playing Hook is very much like doing this.
2. This is the sort of puzzle game that frequently gets damned w/ the casual tag. Fine. Hook is a casual game. You are not going to spend five hundred hours honing your skills on this game. It's simple. You can play it on your phone if you want. Is that a horrible thing?
3. What it does give you is one hour of gameplay that is really good for a buck.
4. The graphical presentation here is extremely minimal. It's all black and white lines and circles and dots. The puzzles look like stylish circuit diagrams. I personally found this quite alluring and picked this up mostly because I saw the screenshots and wondered what it was all about.
5. The sound is similarly subdued. Slowly played electric piano notes sprawl and reverberate. The switch-flip clicking effects from your gameplay provide the percussion. It fits together cohesively and fits the graphics well.
6. Hook teaches you how to play just by presenting the puzzles in the right order. You start it up and are immediately presented w/ the first puzzle. You sit there huffing glue and drinking grain alcohol, waiting for the title menu to pop up but it never does. Eventually you click a few times on the most obvious thing to click and off you go.
7. Basically, what you do is untie knots. The little stylish circuit board traces are laid out such that they are in great tanglations w/ each other. You need to unravel this disorder by clicking on them.
8. As per puzzle game standard, you start w/ just a few elements and it grows more complicated from there. At first you spend a few levels just click, click, clicking away in whatever order you chose. Eventually, there are wires that hook around other wires that must be removed first. Then there are wires that cross through other wires. Then there are little turny bits that let you rearrange the wires and after that there are little symbols which are interconnected through magic and cause wires to be connected in strange and complicated ways.
9. When solving the puzzles, your next move is always just to remove any unencumbered piece of the puzzle w/o disturbing anything else. You spend a bunch of time turning turny bits and tracing traces and making sure this is all set up correctly before you make your move. There are no time limits, no turn limits and no limits to how many times you can change things in the puzzle.
10. The result of a wrong move is you have to restart the puzzle and have to redo your first couple moves again. No big deal. The more complicated puzzles later in the game give you three chances.
11. The end result of 9 and 10 is Hook never gets seriously difficult but this also makes it unique. Most puzzle games require you to do some mental gymnastics and lateral thinking to beat them. This just requires plenty of patience, which keeps the puzzles satisfying w/o requiring too much mental energy. It works.
12. I feel like there was some missed opportunity for replayability after your first playthrough here. It seems like the developers could have added some extra layers of challenge by adding a timer, having a no mistakes mode where you return to the beginning of the game if you screw up once and/or challenging players to solve the puzzles w/ the fewest moves possible. Then again, part of the beauty of this game is its simplicity so perhaps that would be too much.
13. Hook provides a lot of what people find appealing in walking sims--that ability to just drift along and enjoy the game w/o having to tense up and challenge yourself too much--in a much different format. It's a puzzle game that only kind of has puzzles and still manages to be engaging moment to moment. It's worth a dollar and, more importantly, it's worth an evening of your time.
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