HIVESWAP: ACT 2

My honest reaction to finishing HIVESWAP: ACT 2 was something like affection and mild frustration arriving at exactly the same moment. The art team delivered backgrounds that glow with a weird, specific care, detailed train carriages dressed in caste colors, foreground and background layers you can step between, updated character sprites that carry real personality in tiny animations. James Roach and Toby Fox's soundtrack wraps the whole thing in a genre-hopping score where individual troll characters reportedly have musical themes that shift instrumentation depending on caste and importance. That kind of intentionality in a soundtrack is the thing I chase in indie games, and it is absolutely here. The structure plants you aboard an Alternia-bound train with Joey Claire and her troll companion Xefros Tritoh, working car by car up through the hemospectrum, meeting a cast of caste-coded NPCs ranging from awkward to genuinely menacing. You can switch control between Joey and Xefros at will, with whichever one you are not playing following as a companion. The central set piece is an extended courtroom section styled unmistakably after Ace Attorney, complete with expressive talksprites and exaggerated reaction sequences, where Joey is conscripted as a legisracerator defending a jade-blood named Daraya from theft charges. Importing a save from Act 1 changes what evidence you carry in and can shift the outcome. These are the moments Act 2 was built for, and they mostly land. Where it stumbles is in everything that connects those moments. Compared to Act 1, item interaction is dramatically stripped back. For much of the runtime, collected objects do not enter your inventory in any usable way, which guts the tactile satisfaction of classic point-and-click logic. Classic genre thinking, see an interesting object, figure out a use, combine things, is largely replaced by talking to characters in the right order until a path unlocks. The honey farm segment became something of a minor symbol for this: environmental props that look solvable the old-fashioned way turn out to be decorative. Veterans of LucasArts-era design will feel that absence. The game is also self-aware about its errand-heavy pacing in a very Homestuck way, having characters comment on the tedium, but acknowledging a drag is not the same as fixing one. For Homestuck-adjacent players and anyone who completed Act 1 and Friendsim, the troll cast is the reason to be here. The world of Alternia, rendered in this particular hand-drawn style, is genuinely one of the more distinctive-looking places in indie adventure games. At roughly seven hours it runs longer than Act 1's three, which is generous or indulgent depending on your tolerance for the slower sections. Save import is worth doing for the hidden outcomes. New players can use the built-in recap to start fresh, though the series' accumulated lore sits beneath the surface of almost every exchange, rewarding the initiated and occasionally confusing everyone else. ACT 2 is the installment of a four-part series where only two acts have released so far, with Act 3 still in development. Buying in now means sitting with an unfinished story for an undefined stretch of time. For those who already love Alternia, the soundtrack alone carries emotional weight enough to justify the trip. For everyone else, Act 1 is still the cleaner, tighter argument for why this universe deserves your attention.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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