Heeey! Park-Boy Review: Dehydrated
Heeey! Park-Boy was the bonus game in January's Humble Choice. It's pretty clearly inspired by early 2000's "little guy, big world" games like Chibi-Robo and Katamari, and admits to as much on its itch page. HPB follows U-Boy, an alien whose head looks like a U, after he crash lands on Earth because negative emotions pulled down his happiness-powered ship. The only solution is, obviously, to re-vegetate the park.
You do that by spraying water at flower buds until they grow into a fully blossomed white flower, then playing keyboard at them until they turn another color and spray new buds everywhere. Then you repeat that about 2,000 times in order to turn all the bits of the park green. There's a certain satisfaction to seeing the flowers pop up and the soil turn green, and there are upgrades you can buy with flowers to speed it along, but it's definitely several times longer than it needed to be. Even using it as a podcast game, I was sick of doing the same thing over and over again well before the end.
And that end is, uh, nothing. It tells you to turn every patch of the park green, and I did, but then nothing happens. Maybe I needed to buy more upgrades. More likely, there was a way to remove the broken bench barriers and unlock an even bigger section of the park that I could just about see through the fence. But the game clearly said I had at least planted enough flowers to open every upgrade in the store and I'd completed the initial goal, so the Sisyphean hell of fully flowering an endlessly expanding park is not for me. I'm calling this one done even if it didn't roll credits.
If you have Humble Choice anyway and need a podcast game for an hour or two, I think it says enjoyable for about that length. If you have a good enough book, which I thankfully did, you can probably finish off the main park in four hours without wanting to die. But that's the closest thing to a recommendation I can give it.
Time to beat: 4 hours
Platform: PC
MSRP: Only available through Humble Choice