Hoser (PC)
The Snake game formula is one of the earliest styles to catch on in video games, many iterations starting to explore how the simple gameplay could be altered or evolved. In most of them, your long character eats little dots as they move forward automatically, growing bigger with each one they consume and having more trouble avoiding their own tail as any contact with it or the area’s borders means instant death. Hoser, despite being a snake game that came out fairly early on to boot, was already seeing which elements could be adjusted and iterated upon, because when you grab a dot in this game, you don’t grow.
Hoser’s main threat is instead a countdown timer. While you play as this game’s replacement for a snake, a somehow animate garden hose, you try to guide yourself to little dots that are meant to represent faucets. Once you touch one, a new one will appear elsewhere, but your hose will remain the same length. At the top and bottom of the screen though, bars of purple will slowly expand from the left side to the right, these identified as a pressure valve perhaps more for the pun of applying pressure to the player than making sense to the real life object. If the pressure valve reaches its limit, the action is briefly stopped, any faucets on screen disappearing to appear elsewhere while your hose’s body is lengthened. The extra mass needs some time to uncoil though, as you start moving forward it will be a bit before you can see where your tail truly ends, but even if you fail to beat the pressure valve you don’t lose a life. You can conceivably still finish the level, and when you start the next stage you’ll be back to your shorter length as well. Dying also reverts you to the more manageable size, meaning even if you get incredibly large and unwieldy you’re the one with a pressure valve of sorts since you can die and try the stage over again.
Having unique stages rather than just being an infinite challenge until you die is another way Hoser sets itself apart from the basic Snake game formula. Levels will have geometric objects appear on screen to fill up some of the field. The first stage in the game’s Amateur mode for example only draws a simple line across the middle that won’t bother you too much, but since you do still need to avoid crashing into borders or yourself, it is only a preview of the game’s willingness to place dangers in the limited play area. Later stages can start drawing large circles that you’ll need to find your way around to beat the timer and you’ll start experiencing stages where you need to worm your way through rather restrictive boxed in spaces to survive. Threading the needle becomes a pretty common gameplay concept, the Hoser expected to go through entrances that are only as big as its head so you have to line it up just right to pass through. Your speed is at a reasonable level where lining yourself up just right isn’t unmanageable, but it still asks you to watch where the length of your body is so that you can slip through spaces without blocking future movement.
Asking you to slip in spaces with very little margin for error at first starts off rather thrilling. There will still be wider and more forgiving areas in a stage where the faucets are likely to appear, but needing to slip through the space between barriers to reach them pushes you towards the threat of immediate death if you aren’t careful. As the game goes on though, the demands become perhaps a little too tight. In some of the tougher levels you can still pick your path to some extent, going around obstacles or through the small corridors based on if you want to take the risk to avoid losing out to the pressure valve timer. Some stages though just start to give you one option for reaching certain areas of the screen, one later stage straining things a fair bit with its concept. In that stage the play field is split into three large columns, the left and right ones open and empty but the middle a limited thoroughfare. You’ll need to take a minimum of four perfectly timed turns to slip through a maze-like box in the middle, and with it being the only way to pass between the different columns, you start running into a few issues. If your body is long enough it could clog that box and you won’t be able to reach the other side in time, and the game doesn’t always seem the best at placing faucets where you can reasonably reach them before the pressure valve is full.
In many levels, Hoser does seem to at least understand spacing out its faucets close enough they could be grabbed in succession. Early levels only have one faucet at a time to touch before a new one appears, but soon harder levels expand it out to 2 and then 3 faucets that need to be grabbed before the pressure valve reaches its limit. The stage design and number of faucets don’t always agree with each other, that three column stage certainly a difficult challenge but needing to grab three faucets that might be placed in a way you can’t really get to them in time feels like it goes a bit too far. If the number of faucets scaled to the stage’s design then Hoser would actually be quite good, the tight spaces keeping you on edge as you try to slip through quickly to reach your targets, but the balance between your goal and how the stage is laid out isn’t always perfect. Luckily, beating a level always grants you an extra life. Once you’ve grabbed three batches of faucets successfully your hose attaches to the last one to redeem its points and move things along to the next level. Early stages can end up being fairly good sources for the extra hoses needed to clear those more demanding and sometimes uneven levels, those moments of randomness where the faucets don’t appear in ways feasible for you to reach offset some by this level of generosity.
The different stage barriers and race against the pressure valve timer make Hoser’s default mode an interesting twist on the Snake concept, and with its controls simple enough you can micromanage your hose’s movement fairly well. However, moving in the four directions of your arrow keys is only how you play the game’s Amateur mode, the name perhaps not a good match for its eventual difficulty level but the Professional mode is certainly more difficult with its added twist to the action. You’ll still be trying to get around objects in the environment to grab faucets in Professional, but there is now some effort to imagine the play field as an almost 3D space. The game doesn’t really pull off a convincing illusion of it despite drawing cubes and other barriers meant to have an illusion of depth, but they do at least look noticeably different so that you won’t forget which mode you’re in. Professional mode changes how your living hose moves, the up and down arrow keys now moving diagonally. The upward and downward diagonals only move in one direction each so you’ll always go up and right or down and left, adjusting your mindset at first part of the challenge but soon you’ll figure out to take diagonal turns early so your line doesn’t crash. The same rules about expanding faucet amounts apply and hit the same snag as Amateur mode’s later levels, although in Professional it can be more demanding since you might need to squeeze into a rough angle and slip out just in time on top of doing the needle threading. There are still some good levels to be found in Professional before Hoser’s balance once more goes out of whack thanks to some slowly less realistic expectations on how fast and precisely you can cover the necessary ground to survive.
THE VERDICT: Hoser has a few good ideas on how to evolve the Snake game style. The focus on levels that often demand moments of tight precise movement makes chasing down the dots a bit more thrilling than just worrying about touching your tail. Professional throws a monkey wrench into things with its diagonal movement to vary things up a bit further, but once you’ve made it a good distance into either of the game’s modes the actual movement space and faucet placement stops lining up neatly and luck becomes a somewhat bothersome element. The willingness to give you extra lives so often is a decent cushion, but Hoser’s enjoyment hits a wall when it becomes too restrictive.
And so, I give Hoser for PC…
An OKAY rating. On the cusp of being Good instead, Hoser needed a little more self control in how it lays out its more challenging stages to avoid the troubles that make it only a moderate success. The somewhat random faucet placement in levels like the triple column maze can become quickly untenable to grab as you’ll likely be unable to grab all the faucets in time and your expanding body clogs up the only way to get between blocked off areas. Hoser is at its best when you’re constantly using tight spaces to enter more open spots and deciding what you think the best route to all the faucets is to get there in time, so when it starts closing off options, it starts making it more a matter of turning at the exact right moment on top of some favorable luck. The extra lives do mean it can work out in your favor and you can move along eventually, but the later stage layouts drain away the early game’s appeal, and with progress being the main goal since your score is heavily tied to how far you go, getting to the later levels is still the only objective.
Hoser having the two modes does mean you get a bit more out of the game before it starts walling you with less effective designs and for a quick bit of play it’s certainly a nice little surge of entertainment before the unfortunate drop-off, but had it considered ways to balance those more rigid stages with things like less faucets then it would be easier to unconditionally identify this as a nifty twist on Snake play that doesn’t just feel like a ripoff. It might even beat out the original Snake design in some areas, but because it can’t fully execute its own concept, it instead feels like it needs its own iterative follow-up that refines and adjusts its mechanics into something cleaner and more compelling.