Henry Halfhead

I went in expecting a gimmick and came out the other side a little hollowed out in the best possible way. Henry Halfhead is a third-person sandbox puzzle game born from a student project at a Zurich design school, and it carries that origin with total sincerity. You play as Henry, literally nothing but the top half of a head, who navigates an entire lifetime by possessing the inanimate objects around them. A ball bounces you across the nursery floor. A paper plane carries you across the room. A knife slices your morning toast. A watering can hydrates your plants. The object roster runs into the hundreds, and the quiet genius of it is that each item behaves exactly as you would expect physics to allow, which means half your solutions will be clever and half will be spectacular, unplanned chaos. The structure follows Henry from infancy through school, working life, and into old age, and each chapter changes what it asks of you. The early levels are pure play, low stakes, wonderfully loose. As Henry hits the workforce, the game deliberately tightens its grip: repetitive tasks, correct sorting, the grind of routine. Some reviewers found this section frustrating; I think it earns every second of it. When the game finally loosens again and hands you back the freedom to become a seed, plant it, and then become the flower, the relief is genuinely felt. The structure is the message. The pacing is the argument. What holds this whole thing together is the narrator, voiced by one of the developers, who reacts in real time to whatever nonsense you are currently pulling off. Become a bar of soap in the wrong moment and they will note it. Try to eat every piece of cake before completing the objective and they will call it out. It has the warm, attentive quality of a parent watching a child discover the world, which is exactly the emotional register the game is going for. The sound design and music match the visual palette, all soft edges and deliberate warmth, never cluttered. This is a game that understood what it wanted to sound like. There are genuine criticisms to make. At two to four hours depending on how thoroughly you poke around, Henry Halfhead will feel thin to anyone expecting mechanical depth. Some players have noted that the middle work sequence can feel more exhausting than intentional, and that the sheer variety of objects starts to blur once the novelty wears off. The camera can be a headache in tighter spaces. And because the entire game takes place within Henry's solitary world, with no other characters to speak of, the loneliness of the premise can sit uncomfortably for some. Whether that is a flaw or a feature depends entirely on how you read the story being told. The local co-op mode addresses some of the isolation, letting two Henrys cause twice the chaos, and it is a genuinely different and looser experience than playing alone. Lululu Entertainment is a tiny Zurich studio, and Henry Halfhead is their most considered work. It knows when it is being funny and it knows when it is being sad, and it is honest enough to let both things be true at the same time. For anyone who has ever loved a small, handcrafted game that asks you to slow down and pay attention, this one is worth the afternoon.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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