Henry the Hamster Handler (Switch)

Henry the Hamster Handler for the Switch is the follow up to a VR title all about trying to make a safe path for hamsters through perilous levels, a gameplay style similar to the kind found in games like Lemmings and the Mario vs. Donkey Kong Mini Mario games. However, despite sharing a pretty close name with the Virtual Reality game, porting it to Switch required some changes to match the console’s capabilities. While I have no first hand experience with the VR title, a look between the two games makes it very clear that they are surprisingly different, the Switch incarnation clearly having less thought put into its design.

The first odd thing you’ll notice about Henry the Hamster Handler is the titular Henry never makes an appearance to handle any hamsters. In fact, the story of the title is not explained in-game at all, the game’s store page explaining that the player is supposedly involved in the practice of hamster alchemy. As long as a hamster survives enough near-death experiences, it will gradually change into more precious metals so that it can be melted down into jewelry. This aspect isn’t shown in-game either, but the goal is still fairly straightforward as you start up the first level. Your objective is to make sure enough hamsters make it to the end of the level alive, the little critters moving at their own pace and coming across a few traps along the way. Each trap has its own assigned button to press to deactivate it if it is dangerous or to activate it if it is helpful. The hamsters will be blindly marching towards things like electrical traps, acid pits, and fire vents that you need to disable, and to avoid spike traps you’ll be called on to inflate hamsters like bubbles or teleport them to different parts of the level. The hamsters are fairly cute and their potential deaths more like the comical slapstick of Tom and Jerry than something cruel, but the music in the levels and visual backdrops will cycle through arbitrary loops, meaning that the set dressing plays no real role in indicating your progression.

The core of Henry the Hamster Handler is solid enough, although calling it a puzzle game as most sites suggests feels a bit less accurate than saying it’s sort of like a rhythm game but one not set to music. The hamsters will enter the level at set intervals, the player needing to press the buttons to toggle traps so that they can continue safely onward. As more hamsters enter the fray, it’s very easy to settle into a routine of pressing the buttons in a specific pattern with a consistent pace. The button you need to press even drops in from above like its a Dance Dance Revolution arrow lining up with its slot, and there is an audio cue that will tell you in a squeaky hamster voice what button needs to be pressed. You can disable this option if you want to go on visuals alone, but finding the rhythm seems to be the idea behind beating the levels. If you hit a button at the wrong time, you get docked 1 point from your starting pool of 100, and a hamster death will kick it down ten whole points. The point quota slowly climbs as you progress, but there is no reason to try and go for a perfect run as the game does not discriminate between a perfect run and barely passing, one of the first signs of Henry the Hamster Handler’s greater issues.

Henry the Hamster Handler boasts of an impressive 300 level count, but as you begin playing it, you’ll see how this high number was achieved. The game starts off introducing you to its mechanics fairly quickly, putting all the traps on the table so that there’s nothing for later levels to really add to the level formula. Every trap has one set button tied to it, but the game does not even seem to use the entire Switch controller layout, meaning that there was no reason they couldn’t have added ZL, ZR, L, R, or even the oddly absent Y to the game in later levels to throw in a curveball. The only other real notable mechanic outside button pressing is a hamster who shuffles across the screen sometimes to obscure your view, but its effect is minimal due to it appearing at best once per stage. Henry the Hamster Handler shows you all of its cards early, and eventually you’ll realize that’s not all it exhausts early on. The game has maybe twenty-odd level designs that it will shuffle around as you progress, the only differences on revisits being how it places traps and which kind of traps it throws at you. You’ve seen most of the game before you’ve even really cut your teeth on it.

Even odder, the difficulty climb in Henry the Hamster Handler is incredibly slow and inconsistent. You’ll spend level after level with simple rhythms, suddenly hit one with a challenging design, and not see another like it for a good stretch. Besides these odd surges, the difficulty escalation is so gradual that it can be hard to notice it even happening, and it feels incredibly odd to beat the 100th level and learn that you were apparently on Easy mode. Normal has 100 stages and Hard rounds things out with its own 100, and while you will eventually start hitting some stages that challenge the player’s ability to keep up the button pressing rhythm, it arrives far too late. Around stage 250 is where I feel the difficulty finally hits a spot it should have reached very shortly after it taught you the game, the challenge here mainly coming from back to back traps and a less lenient point quota that does inject a bit of late game enjoyment after pushing through far too many levels of repetition.

Perhaps the game is designed like this because of the system its made for. The Nintendo Switch’s portability means some players will only pick up a game and play it in short bursts, but even a casual player will soon notice that the game is hardly changing as it progresses. In some ways, Henry the Hamster Handler’s problem isn’t so much its gameplay design, just an overabundance of content. Having tons of levels means nothing if they’re not smartly designed, and the layout recycling does the game no favors. There are a few potential remedies, the most obvious one would have been having less levels but having more varied designs. Even just 25 for each difficulty stage would be more enjoyable than 300 so long as the stages keep changing and introducing new challenges. Another simple way would be adding a frankly baffling absent feature: stage select. Henry the Hamster Handler is a fully linear experience, the game requiring you to beat every single level in a row, giving you no way to replay old levels and no way to start on a higher difficulty level. There are no extra goals to the game beside level completion, so there wouldn’t even be a reason to revisit them if you could. The way it is now though, the game asks too much commitment from the player with little reward and nothing to engage with outside of the basic gameplay.

THE VERDICT: Henry the Hamster Handler is in an oddly unique situation as it seems like a game that never leaves its beginning. All the core mechanics are introduced early and are solid, but there is no real evolution, the difficulty only barely reaching the point some puzzle and rhythm games hit before they even let you leave the early stages. Falling into the rhythm of saving the hamsters from peril has its moments where its appeal shows, but the game spreads it thin over far too many levels, those levels only having a small bank of designs to pull on and thus makes them too repetitive. In short bursts these issues are less glaring, and plucking any 20 levels randomly from the game would make for a decent experience, but Henry the Hamster Handler ends up in a weird situation where it just has too much content for its own good and not the kind of content it needs.

And so, I give Henry the Hamster Handler for the Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Henry the Hamster Handler is functional and could serve as the basis of a more involved and interesting title, but unfortunately all we have been given is the groundwork for a better imaginary game. The potential is easy to read in the more enjoyable and challenging stages, but not enough effort went into adding diversity to the gameplay. Even a few small options would immediately make things less tedious. A level select, extra goals like getting 100% on a stage, or even just reconfiguring the game into 100 levels but with three different difficulty settings to pick from would mean players would face less issues with the reappearing stage designs. The gameplay would still need to gradually grow as well to make players want to stick around, even if the count was reduced to 100 levels.

Henry the Hamster Handler is a game players can handle, but the progression is made dull due to its slowness and there’s not enough unique content to make sticking around worth it.  In some ways, it feels like the game we got was the prototype of something that was going to have more added to it but we accidentally got it before placeholder designs could be replaced or new elements could be added.