Hohokum studio Honeyslug on building worlds, rejecting didactic design and working with Sony

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Normally, it’s polite to make eye contact when you’re interviewing someone, but we can’t take our eyes off Ricky Haggett’s game. Hohokum looks gorgeous in the conventional sense – brightly coloured, lovingly animated, dense with detail. But we’re not just ignoring Haggett because of the pretty pictures. We don’t want to miss anything. Hohokum is a game about endless discovery – about seeing what happens when you go there, when you do this or try that, and it’s always generous in its rewards. It’s a charming game from Honeyslug and designer Haggett, who’s being very understanding of our inattentiveness.

Hohokum is pointed game. It’s hardly dogmatic or angry, but it’s a clear response to recent gaming trends. Rejecting clear objectives and heavy-handed tutorials, Hohokum casts players as a sinewy dragon-snake-thing in a strange fantasy land and lets them explore a brightly coloured 2D world, discovering for themselves the tasks and interactions squirreled away in its environments. You might pick up some wavy-armed passengers while sailing through a rural looking village. You might fly through moonlit forests, the foliage lighting up as you pass by. You might fly up and up, tracing constellations in the stars. It’s up to you, Haggett explains.

“I think that increasingly we’re seeing more and more games [reject overt handholding]” Haggett says. “I don’t think Hohokum invented the idea of a game being freeform and open and not so didactic. I think there are more and more games that are doing this. Proteus is one, Gone Home is another,” he continues.

“I mean, if you’re playing World Of Warcraft then your first experience needs to be ‘here’s how you do things in this game, here’s how it works’. It needs to teach you the systems. But when you play, I don’t know…Pullblox on 3DS. That’s such a simple, beautiful mechanic that it actually ruins the game for you to make me jump through six tutorials that explain it in tedious detail. I’d really like to see more games that are based around this idea of not teaching, but I’d also just like more games to give their players a bit of space.”

And that’s what Hohokum does. Haggett’s favourite means of introducing someone to the game is to simply hand them a controller, and let them find something to do in Honeyslug’s entirely non-threatening world. We opt to try a little gardening: the villagers riding on our backs grab the giant seeds dotted around their village, and then we find fertile mounds in which to place them. Soon, we accidentally stumble upon a portal that takes us to a night-time scene – and then another portal takes us to a floating world that feels like a 2D Super Mario Galaxy: a chain of planetoids is suspended in the sky, and we can dive in out of the watery outer layers.

Hohokum could easily offer nothing more than disconnected, abstract prettiness, but there’s a consistency of art style and imagination here that sells the idea of connected world. This, as Haggett explains, is key part of Hohokum.

“We want to have a sense of well-roundedness. We’re not trying to tick every box, but there’s a city, there’s factories; busy, cosmopolitan places and there’s very rural places like the village. And there are wild places; there are deserts. And they feel all feel like they’re rooted in the reality of our world.

“We’re not trying to convey an overall narrative or theme, though one of the challenges we have as we finish the game is joining these places together in a way that feels satisfactory and solid, and has an internal logic to it.”

Hohokum reminds us of Fez – it’s in the pastel colour scheme, certainly, though Honeyslug has favoured a wavy-lined art style over pixellated intricacy – but it’s also in the way the game gently rewards your explorations with new glimpses of a coherent, beautiful world.

“I think that’s what Fez does so successfully,” Haggett acknowledges. “Phil [Fish] jokes about how long it took to make Fez and how ridiculous it was that it took him so long, but I actually I think that when you play Fez, you get a sense that the world feels lived in. Go to some of those abandoned village scenes…there’s bits of that game where you really feel that someone’s really spent time there. There’s no characters or dialogue. All there is is some murals, but you really get a sense of weight. He really knows what this place means to him.”

Hohokum will release on PS3, PS4 and Vita this year, and Honeyslug’s close relationship with Sony extends to development duties. Santa Monica Studio, which has worked with Thatgamecompany on Journey and Giant Sparrow on The Unfinished Swan, is helping bring the project to fruition. With Sony and Microsoft’s contrasting attitudes to indie development recently under scrutiny, we asked Haggett to share his experience working with PlayStation.

“We knew Hohokum would be way too expensive for us to even consider trying to do it all ourselves,” Haggett says. “So we knew we needed somebody to help us. There were lots of people we could talk to, because [artist Richard Hogg]‘s work is so beautiful, lots of companies were interested in talking. But very few companies would understand what they were funding and why they were funding it. And on that very short list, Sony Santa Monica was pretty much the top because of the all the stuff they’ve done. We’re massive fans of the Thatgamecompany games, The Unfinished Swan and Sound Shapes,” he continues.

“It became clear they were definitely the right people. It’s been a really fruitful creative relationship. Some of the guys there have been really involved with design but in a hands-off way, where they’re trying to help us be true to our vision. There’s a lot of really complicated decisions to make, where when you’re close to something it’s really hard to take a step back a wide view. And having people we trust who have a bit more distance from it has been incredibly helpful.”