Buy Hylics

Rarely and every couple of years, in the indie gaming scene tends to appears a new creator whose name is destined to be inmortal and referenced in future articles for decades to come. A creator that based in the originality and unbelievable degree of talent showed in his first major commercial attempt, will be cited by future designers, writers and artists as a major influence.

So, you can salute to Mason Lindroth. An be prepared to see his name and the name of Hylics in hundred of articles. In all-time best videogames lists. In conferences talking about experimental narrative but also in those talking about animation and how to break established conceptions in the artistic design field. But most importantly, cited as an essential recommendation and life changer experience by your most beloved friends. Because Mason Lindroth is now in this list of the chosen ones, close to the names of Edmund McMillen, Jonathan Blow, David Kanaga, Davey Wreden or Rami Ismail.

Mason Lindroth defines himself as an animator that uses videogames as an artistic tool for creation, rather than as a videogame designer. His art style is a lysergic amalgam between the drawing pencil artwork seen in Bill Plympton’s most wilderness animation films and an experimental approach to the claymation technique, using a lot of bizarre materials in the sculpture of its elements. His work truly shines with originality, and seeing figures that seems hand drawn by pencil and that are animated through stop motion causes an impact similar to the first time that you could see The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker in movement.

But the best part is his almost obsessive degree of perfectionism, with dozens of billions of subtle and almost imperceptible details. The game doesn’t repeat a single asset in any of its maps. You learn magic skills watching television, and every single skill has its own television’s marquee design. Every attack has a distinctive animation, doing psychic movements with the hands. Every single monster is also animated in the main map screen. Every scenario has lots of interactive elements that can be deformed, altered, all of them with its own unique animation. If you open a treasure chest, then you have an animation of the chest being opened. If you crush a garbage can, you can see the deformation created in the metal. You haven’t seen before a JRPG with 16 bits aesthetics and this unattainable level of detail. Because the JRPG genre tends to use a lot of times the imagination as a substitute to time-consuming graphic assets. But in Hylics, all the elements are shown in a material and tangible way. Every item that can be used to debuff stats in the combat, has his own graphic asset and animation in screen. If you win a combat, the enemy doesn’t disappear in the main map, you can see how disintegrates, and then his corpse. EVERY single combat has a DIFFERENT screen background!

But Hylics IS MUCH MORE than its artistic design or its captivating world with an original and distinctive lore. The TRUE ACHIEVEMENT of Hylics comes in its narrative. With a radical approach taken in its writing, influenced by beat generation writers as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac or by the most experimental works of Bob Dylan in his Tarantula creative period.

The 90% of the writing in Hylics comes in the form of procedurally generated, highly fragmented verses extracted from cryptic and almost impossible poems. Including a lot of subversive messages and distant voices, resonating in a dystopian and incredible oppressive world. This element of narrative creates in the player a constant sense of paranoia, similar to watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult classic film The Holy Mountain. Hylics even surpass the grade of perverseness and quirky nature found in Lisa. And this joyful sense of bizarreness is approached in even more complex and subtle ways, using abstract poetry and a dylanesque speech about human alienation.

And even in its general game design, Hylycs shines. With exigent combats that requieres a lot of thinking. Brilliantly designed puzzles. LOTS of secrets. An innovative experience system that requires that you die to improve the character in a limbo parallel reality. Even its soundtrack is MEMORABLE, with a lot of psychedelic rock disturbing compositions, that helps to create some short of state of trance in the player. While he deliberately lost his sanity in one of the most fascinating parallel universes created for a videogame.

Hylics is a rare example of piece of art in which every single element is sublime and a leap forward. And it puts the name of Mason Lindroth written with golden letters in the history of the interactive medium.


( The writer of this review is not an English native. So you should expect occasional grammar errors. I apologize in advance. )

I have no meat to grind so on the couch I shall lie to restore my flesh and will.
Never have I witnessed sommething so odd and familiar, almost comforting.
I cannot recomend this to everyone, but if you read Lewis Carrol's Jaberwocky, and it made sense, or you think day to day life is simply a mundane veil through which we filter the wierdness through and you want to rip the blinders away, this might be for you.

If you're worried about the short playtime, I put a couple hours into this game when it first released on Itch.io. I bought it again here since I kind of love it.


This game goes out of its way to be strange. Every aspect from the possibly questionably claymation art,the noise rock soundtrack, the nonsensical item descriptions, the randomly generated dialogue for non-important NPCs, and the 90s pop art attitude exude a casual absurdism. Eventually, a new logic emerges that, while non-sensical, stays consistent and lets you get lost in a world completely unlike reality. Don't worry just go with it. Throwing the flesh of your fallen foes into a meatgrinder at the entrance of Death gives you more Meat Points? Just go with it. Frozen burritos are powerful projectile weapons while warm ones are healing items? Don't worry about it. Eat up. A random NPC in the Mortal City raises insects? Not a problem. Kinda gross though.


If all Hylics had to offer was the weird, then the game would be hard to recommend. But Hylics uses its absurdism as an escape from convention, allowing it to explore simple but interesting new ways to tweak the traditional JRPG formula. There's no leveling to speak of. Instead, you have to explore the world and find new equipment and abilities to grow stronger. Remember that part above about depositing meat into a grinder to gain more Meat Points? Meat Points are health. This means if you've defeated any enemies before dying, your max HP can be be upgraded upon death. In that same area you go after a death, a counter lets you into a room to get a new ability after 3 deaths. Items can be bought from vendors, but like the cold burritos that can be turned into healing items by warming them up in the microwave, items don't give straight statistical boosts. Similar to Atlas games, status effects actually debilitate your character, so a technically better item might be less useful than something that stops a certain effect.

These moves to make death interesting, growth non-linear, and exploration central to progression make Hylics a fantastic cheap and short game that will burn through an afternoon and leave you satisfied and mildly confused.

TL;DR: Hylics is weird, smart, pushes JRPGs in new directions, and costs less than a coke and candy bar. The ♥♥♥♥ are you waiting for?

Bought for the RPG, stayed for the animation.
What can i say about this?
Space Funeral meets Claymation and Insanity
I hope this becomes one of the great RPGs we come to know and praise like Lisa, Undertale, Off, Suits, and Space Funeral.

it doesn't make any sense

Hylics is an indie psychedelic RPG game by Mason Lindroth. I'll be honest with you: I have no idea what's even going on with this game. It's incredibly weird and fantastical -- and that's probably why I love it so much. This game features amazing art made with clay and rendered in Photoshop for the grainy pixelized look. The battles are done in a typical RPG format with trippy battle animations. There's a lot of procedural text generation in this game, making the dialogue extremely fun to read.

Everything about this game is an experience. Guitars scratch and croon in the background as you explore its strange world. Backgrounds sway gently and can make you nauseous. Exploration is peaceful, but it also makes you feel slightly uncomfortable as things get even weirder. In 5 minutes of the game, I'm reading poetic talk that doesn't make any sense, learning battle techniques by watching television, and making sandcastles on the beach in the afterlife. It's a really strange game.

I honestly don't think I can recommend this game to just anyone. It's one of those art projects that's probably going to polarize a lot of its audience, especially on Steam. However, for $3, it's a great grab for anybody looking for something odd and different. It's pretty short, it should last you no more than a couple of hours. In this game, what you get out of it is what you put into it. I play it to relax, explore, and laugh. I hope you can embrace its strangeness and just chill to its dank tunes.

TL; DR: For fans of Yume Nikki, Beeswing, LISA, EarthBound, and Undertale.

this game needs more love

Videogames are Art and this is the best example of it.

Hylics is the kind of game I was sure never existed, as much as I wish it did. I always had a dream about this surreal spectacle, one to subvert all the conventions of the video game medium, something truly special and different, a ♥♥♥♥ing strange game unlike any other. It wasn't until a week before this review that I saw the trailer for Hylics when I felt like the sheer bounds gaming can in fact be expanded and thoroughly toyed with to mold this weird as ♥♥♥♥, silly, off-the-wall alien world of meaty clayflesh and some bug♥♥♥♥fest galore that was just positively psyche-protruding.

In the same way the game bends gaming conventions, I'll bend the convention of a positive review and go on and rant about my disappointment for "Hylics" even though by all means the game is still great, really. I never really got the impression the game was promising anything more than just being a weird little fun thing, so I only have myself to blame for wanting more out of it. Holy ♥♥♥♥ did I want more, though. After watching the trailer I thought this may be "the one" -- the real video-game-medium subverter, the real one to make you question what a game can do, what a game can be -- a true candidate to push forward in the whole "games as art" debate that's still going on now. I can now safely confirm with conviction this game doesn't carry that weight, so I'll keep searching. But it's still a neat diversion.

I should probably get the bad out of the way, before I do come to its positives. The most prominent disappointment to me is the game's narrative, or lack thereof. In Hylics, there's no attempt to make any kind of decent story, even a nonsensical or non-coherent one. There doesn't exist a world to get lost in, or characters to care about or be invested in. The furthest it goes in having any sort of plot (besides its ending, which I won’t spoil) are the very brief sections in which you play a caped-man who sets off the game's "acts", though there really aren't any. In these sections, and through the rest of the game, there are strange, pseudo-poetic verses that are often spoken, and carry no meaning. It seems to be randomly-generated gibberish, and although it lends to the game's atmosphere, it doesn't serve any other purpose. It's more or less the same with the dialogue, though there's often less continuity there, because some of the humanoid characters/creatures speak that total fake-poem nonsense, and others talk completely casually and normally, like people. While amusing, it definitely takes you out of the experience, since the two extremes clash, more than anything. The main characters (especially Wayne) are themselves brilliant in their design, but are memorable only for their design alone, which is unfortunately the most shallow quality a character can have, even for a surreal game. I got the impression weaving together any sort of story in the game was one of the last priorities in creating it -- which was a painful impression for me to get, as a game like this would have benefitted so much with an inventive, creative absurdist narrative.

It sounds like I’m being harsh, but it’s just testament to my disappointment for the game. Wasted potential hurts, but I’ve never felt it become tangibly part of the game as much as Hylics. The gameplay was so straightforward and repititive, too, that those were the only thoughts in my head as I had to tediously traverse the landscape back-and-forth RPG-style and grind through countless pointless enemies. Herein lies the other primarily problem -- the lasting factor, and how the game’s effect almost immediately begins to wear off on the player. When I first began, I was floored by the atmosphere and feel of the game, just as I thought I would based off the trailer. This lasted in about the first twenty minutes in the game, and then the oddness just wore off. This surreal world was no longer weird, then -- in fact, I was shocked to find it was contrived and boring and normal. The game is much too-quick to let up on its oddity, and stops delivering almost immediately on everything but its visuals. The intrigue of the world, characters, and story all fade away when you realize there really is none. The only thing left *are* the visuals, and while they’re fantastic, many times I felt like they just weren’t enough to make the game compelling. I began to lose my drive to keep playing, because there was nothing driving me forward except what kind of environments I get to experience next. I wasn’t even anticipating any sort of surprises at this point, because nothing strange or unexpected really happens in the game. As far as unforeseen and unusual events, it’s actually extremely tame. Everything that happens is incredibly predictable from a game-perspective.

To give a particular instance, I ran into an enemy, and the screen went to black for longer than normal. I thought to myself “holy ♥♥♥♥, is some weird ♥♥♥♥ing thing gonna happen now? Is it going to be a new room I accessed on random, or something?” and then the battle just started, as normal, nothing else happened.

The closest the game gets to hitting on these are when control is sporadically and spontaneously taken from Wayne and given to the caped-man who sets off the game’s next act. Every time this would happen, I would feel a glimmer of potential in the increasingly-mounting normality, but it never follows up on it.

Pretty much the sole thing I’ve been praising it on so far is the visuals, and they’re extraordinary. The visual style ranges from rotoscope, to claymation, to traditionally surreal digital art, and it all blends together seamlessly to make something distinctly unique to Hylics and Hylics only. You can absolutely tell the background of the game’s developer, Mason Lindroth, is in art, rather than game design or storytelling. And this isn’t necessarily bad, because it works. The art truly shines through, and makes the three-dollar admission price more than worth it, even if nothing else is good. That’s how strong the visuals are, and that’s why there’s far more fanart of this game than any other form of fan media. Nobody cares enough to speculate about the world, or the characters, because that clearly wasn’t the game’s intention. The intention was to give off a distinct feeling in the visual style of the game, and in this sense, the game succeeds with flying colors more than any other game in recent memory. However, they lost their power on me twenty minutes in, and for that reason Hylics isn’t very memorable. I distinctly remember every criticism I had about this game than I do its actual content, and I wasn’t even looking for them.

I kept finding disparity because the whole experience comes together ultimately with very little lasting impact. It’s as if everything but the visuals were a contrived mechanism or tool that existed just because for it to be a “game”, they needed to. And it’s really sad to me, that a game so strange turned out to be extremely standard. The very, very worst thing a weird game can be is normal. Underneath a thinly-veiled brilliant surreal exterior, Hylics is just a really generic RPGMaker game with nothing else special to it. But it’s still so ♥♥♥♥ing unassumingly odd in a sea of boring-♥♥♥ video games that it still manages to pull together on its surreal and absurd visuals alone. It’s sad that everything else is so terribly droll that when a game like this valiantly fails it still ends up succeeding.

The only game where you can talk to fish about making sandcastles and grinding meat in the afterlife