EGLX 2019: Hit Grab Games

Next up on my look back at EGLX is not just one game, but a set of 4 from a single studio, Hitgrab Inc. I know of this studio from Mouse Hunt a Facebook game going back to some of the earlier days of that site having games on them. It’s actually one of five games to win a grant from the social media site and is more widely available on mobile platforms nowadays. In the days when Farmville was the model for free to play, wide appeal games, Mouse Hunt had a more upfront level of depth sending you off to catch mice in different locations. It’s a classic that’s still a great distraction to your day.

I’ll admit I hadn’t kept up with the studio as I drifted away from Facebook games and Facebook in general, so I was impressed to see what they have been up to. One of the big items is an evolution of the Mouse Hunt concept, Mouse Hunt World. This has taken the idea of Mouse Hunt and merged it with games like Pokemon Go and Ghostbusters World. It uses the tried and true collection idea of Mouse Hunt and brings it to the geolocation trend taking mobile games by storm. One element that I love, living in a rural area, is having “squires” to send out around the world to landmarks. So while I’m in the middle of nowhere in southern Ontario, I can send a squire to Time’s Square in New York to set a trap and collect the mice special to there.  Being able to branch out around the world is such a great idea for a game like this since it no longer punishes the players who don’t travel too often and can be used to drive interest in geography for younger players.

Hitgrab also has an entry in the battle royale genre as well. Outworld Battlegrounds is a top-down retro style take on the genre. I didn’t take up a match of that since it’d be sad to see me killed inside 30 seconds or hide the whole time in the bushes, as are my two strengths when I do play these games. What I loved seeing while watching those who were younger and better than me was, this game uses a sight system. Some of these games have done the top-down style, but only Outworld does a line of sight methods. You can only see what’s in front of you, and only if it’s unobstructed, everything else is darkened and you can’t see what’s sneaking up on you. This lead to some cool spinning from the players to make sure no one else was sneaking up. For me, it would mean hiding in a corner so I couldn’t be snuck up on and hoping to get at least a shot off before I got killed. Joking aside, I love the clean look of this game and the idea of a simplified visual for the hot genre right now.

The last game I checked out from their booth was an action platformer called Clan O’Conall. I can’t help but think that name like a lost group of Highlanders. With the look of the characters I initially thought of Lost Vikings as a source, and it turns out when they pitched it the same reference was made. Really, this game is a take on the same core idea of Trine. You have three characters that you swap in between, each with their own strengths, and work your way through each level solving puzzles, often switching between to get through each screen. The gameplay flow is great, switching and activating special skills took almost no thought, the puzzles glow with the right colour for each character and are telegraphed nicely, and combat feels very solid. Now I’m not great at these types of boss fights, I can see the patterns, but I can’t always execute what I need to do, but this is a classic action platformer boss fight system. Each boss has a pattern and the challenge is dodging the powers used and hitting when the time is right. Given the style of game this is, I’m really excited not just to play it, but to see how speedrunners rip it wide open and what tricks they find.