Horace is a 2D platform adventure with a lot of stories and regular brainteasers. At the same time, it is much more: Horace tells a sometimes emotional family story that is as much about war and peace, friendship, betrayal, or the meaning of life as it is about the bank robbery, time travel, video games, or picking up trash. Sounds funny, and it is. Often even very! Everything starts with the delivery and the subsequent moving in of the humanoid robot Horace at a patchwork family: In charming, but not overly pretty pixel graphics you experience the first days and tasks of Horace, who gives the many cutscenes a special touch with his tinny emotionless computer voice.
Horace rescues the fallen daughter of the family on a rock face, swims through deadly obstacle courses full of circular saws and electric fences, drives an escape car, earns money in mini-games, helps a messie woman clean out her garage, escapes from a tidal wave in sewers, duels giant fighting robots several times, escapes kitchen appliances that have come to life upside down, tangles with the Queen of Hearts of Wonderland, scours crudely pixelated dungeons full of enemies, participates in the pie-throwing contest and sack race at the local church festival, gets crowned king, plays basketball, masters a shoot'em-up passage, runs from a gang of monkeys in prehistoric times, rescues a family from a burning house, plays drums, solves laser puzzles, figures out passwords, gymnastics through a greenhouse full of carnivorous plants, sprints around the globe like Sonic, takes a trip to our Earth's satellite, takes snapshots in a photo booth, chugs through southern England by train, ponders the meaning of his existence, runs through dark corridors in first-person perspective, and rides a burning Ferris wheel at the carnival. Among other things! It's mind-boggling what you experience in the 15 to 20 hours leading up to the heartwarming final credits. Again and again, you ask: What's next? What wild mission is next? And: How the hell did the developers come up with that?
Conclusion
Horace is a well-composed bouncing game with clever gravity and space-twisting mechanics, as well as the obligation to think a long while hopping. Horace not only shines with nerdy pop culture quotes, but can also keep up with strong emotional cinema made in Hollywood in terms of direction: While the basic theme and initial situation are still strongly reminiscent of "The 200 Year Man" (with Robin Williams), an interactive generational novel almost emerges in the course of the plot, which portrays not just one episode, but the entire lives of its protagonists. Only in the stretched-out middle section with its many bosses and some annoying backtracking under time pressure, I thought the makers overshot the mark and didn't know when it was good. By the last quarter, however, the well-tuned mix of plot, skill passages, boss fights, and side quests is back on track. Horace can also be seen as a love letter to video games in general, as it's full of little retro gags in the secret rooms and full-blown arcade games in the 8- and 16-bit manner.
