Hoa

My first thought booting up Hoa was that someone had somehow animated a watercolor sketchbook and handed me a controller. The hand-painted art from Skrollcat Studio is genuinely arresting from the first frame, the kind of thing that makes you slow-walk through areas just to stare at the backgrounds. That first impression holds throughout, and in a game this short, atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting. The question worth asking before you spend your money is whether the thing holding that art up is strong enough to carry you through. Hoa is a 2D puzzle-platformer built around a fairy-like protagonist returning to a ruined homeland. Each area has a sleeping guardian you wake by collecting butterflies and activating seals, and each guardian rewards you with a new ability: a double jump, a ground-slam, and eventually a float that opens up higher paths. The creature-assisted traversal is a genuine highlight. Rhinoceros beetles serve as mobile platforms, skittish ladybugs demand quick timing, and bouncy bugs act as living trampolines. None of it is difficult, and the game is transparent about that contract. You cannot die in most of the game, checkpoints are generous, and the puzzles hover somewhere between "mild detour" and "breezy stroll." Reviewers and players have consistently flagged the challenge floor as a real limitation, and they are right: if you want Celeste-style precision or even the modest friction of a mid-tier platformer, Hoa will leave you unsatisfied. What Hoa does exceptionally well is tone. The orchestral score, composed by Johannes Johansson, is piano-led and genuinely lovely, and it works in lockstep with those visuals to produce something closer to interactive mood music than a traditional game. The story doles itself out in fragments through guardian dialogue, keeping narrative direction deliberately vague until a late tonal shift that catches most players off guard. The final chapter swaps the pastoral warmth for a darker industrial zone and then a disorienting black-and-white inverted-controls sequence where left becomes right and up becomes down. It is the only moment the game asks anything of your reflexes, and it lands harder because of how calm everything before it was. Worth noting: players sensitive to motion sickness should brace for that section specifically. On the practical side, the runtime sits between two and three hours depending on pace, with 18 Steam achievements that most players collect in a single run. Replayability is thin: once the story resolves, there is not much mechanical reason to return. Some platforms reported minor performance hiccups at scene transitions at launch. The PC version is generally regarded as the smoothest of the available versions. Who should buy it: anyone who wants a short, gorgeous, low-pressure experience, parents looking for something appropriate to play alongside younger kids, or seasoned players who need a palette cleanser between harder games. Who should skip it: anyone expecting a platformer with actual bite.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Hoa.