HIVESWAP: Act 1

HIVESWAP: Act 1 is a point-and-click adventure game rooted in the sprawling Homestuck webcomic universe, though you do not need to know a single thing about Homestuck to enjoy it. You play as Joey Claire, a horror-movie-loving teenager yanked out of her attic in 1994 and deposited onto Alternia, a troll-inhabited alien planet that is very much not having a good night. The game wears its love of classic LucasArts-era adventures openly, borrowing the genre's inventory puzzles, dialogue-driven humor, and pixel-adjacent hand-drawn aesthetics without importing the genre's notorious moon-logic frustration. Puzzles are fair, occasionally clever, and paced tightly enough that you will not spend forty minutes rubbing a rubber chicken on everything. The writing is where Act 1 earns its 92% approval rating. Joey has a distinct voice and a backstory that gets doled out in small, rewarding pieces. Her one alien companion for much of the run, Jude, communicates via walkie-talkie from back on Earth, and their sibling dynamic is warm and funny without tipping into saccharine. Dialogue has that Homestuck-specific flavor of earnest weirdness layered over genuinely sharp jokes, and the environmental storytelling in both the attic prologue and the alien street segments does real world-building work without stopping the game to lecture you. If you care about whether a protagonist feels like a person rather than a delivery vehicle for puzzle setups, Joey holds up. The honest caveat, and it is a significant one: Act 1 is short. Most players finish in two to three hours. This is not a full RPG in any mechanical sense despite the genre tag. There are no branching builds, no meaningful choice trees, no combat system to study. What you get is closer to an interactive short story with light puzzle gate-keeping. The RPG classification seems to come from the broader Homestuck-verse branding rather than anything mechanical happening inside this specific release. If you come in expecting stat sheets or dialogue checks, you will be confused and disappointed. For fans of the webcomic, Act 1 is a genuinely well-produced love letter, with original music that slaps harder than it has any right to and animation quality that exceeded what most people expected from the project's famously turbulent development history. For newcomers, it works as a self-contained afternoon romp with a likable lead and a world that is strange enough to be interesting. The cliffhanger ending assumes Act 2 is coming and does leave things unresolved, which is worth knowing before you start. Act 2 was released separately, so the story does continue if you want it to. Bottom line: if you like the adventure game genre, enjoy sharp character writing, and have a couple of hours to spend, this is a comfortable, well-crafted small thing. It is not trying to be Disco Elysium or Planescape. It is trying to be a funny, heartfelt genre tribute with a girl who knows too much about horror movies and not enough about alien trolls. On that narrow mission, it succeeds.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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