It’s so different to the insipid greys and brooding darkness in most horror games, making Happy Game stand out even more. Like a sugar-coated lollipop with a poison centre or regurgitated rainbow-coloured vomit. Vibrant, neon colours produce a sickly-sweet shiny veneer that contrasts wonderfully with the disturbing imagery. The art style does a lot of the heavy lifting to bring the Burtonesque (although you could just as easily call it Amanita’s ‘house-style’ at this point) world to life. It’s a well-trodden trope but it definitely doesn’t make for a trite experience in Happy Game due to Amanita Design’s boundless creativity and ability to depict unique, nightmare-inducing monsters that relentlessly terrorise the young boy. Happy Game plays on the notion that childhood is traumatic it’s only due to constant coddling and pure naivety that we are oblivious to the terrors and strife of human life. Whilst there is certainly joy to be had in solving puzzles, most of the entertainment when playing Happy Game comes from seeing what the notoriously quirky minds of Amanita Design have concocted in the game’s thirty-or-so seamlessly connected and increasingly horrifying vignettes. Most of the puzzles are (literal) child’s play but there were one or two that were abstract enough to cause a few head-scratching moments. Instead, Happy Game, like many of Czech developer Amanita Design’s other games such as Chuchel and Samorost, fosters a more experimental and trial-and-error approach to gameplay encouraging the player to poke and prod (and sometimes stretch, mutilate and eviscerate) on-screen characters and items in order to see what reacts and what doesn’t with no written dialogue or instruction. There is no inventory, combining of items or dialogue trees as is typical for the genre.
Happy Game plays like any point and click adventure using the mouse cursor to move your character an infantile boy of toddler age around various 2D environments that are the psychedelic manifestations of his nightmares in the hope of finding and rescuing several of his favourite toys. Bunnies being decapitated, little ant-like mites being impaled on a skewer, heart-shaped characters being goaded and prodded until they explode in a bloody fountain. It’s a warning to prospective players that despite its name and seemingly pleasant veneer, Happy Game is more akin to a horror experience and probably isn’t the ideal title to sit your five-year-old niece or nephew in front of as their first foray into the point and click genre. Happy Game opens with a message that it is, in fact, not a happy game.
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