Hungry Horace (ZX Spectrum)

With the famous rivalry between Nintendo’s mascot Mario and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog coloring much of people’s perception of early console video games, there has been an effort to sometimes assign mascots to other game companies and systems of that time. The ZX Spectrum has no representative, and yet in the modern day a very peculiar character is bandied about as a potential mascot for the old microcomputer. Horace seems to be some armless blue creature with his torso entirely occupied by hollow eyes as well as what might be hair or a strand of flesh hanging off his back, but with three games releasing rather quickly in the early days of the console, some have elevated this abnormal entity to unusual importance in the internet age. A deep dive by musician Fatnick seemingly confirmed Horace’s mascot status is a modern invention, but it does cast an interesting light on the games that starred him, particularly his debut title Hungry Horace.

 

Hungry Horace is a maze game of a mold quite popular in the early 1980s. The Pac-Man inspiration is clear as you go around a maze gobbling up things in sight and try to avoid enemies who you can turn the tables on with the right item, but as its strange hero might imply, there are some quirky elements to be found in how this gameplay style manifests. First, the mazes Horace navigates are apparently a set of parks and he’s eager to chomp up the flowers growing in his path. Someone must value these parks and their flowers quite highly though, as they are patrolled by guards who will snap up Horace if they can make contact with him and take a life. Represented by pink floating heads wearing hats, the player can frazzle them once per maze by reaching the red bell, its ringing making the guards’ hair stand on end and now Horace can be the one to kick them out should he reach them. Guards can also drop fruit that is worth a good deal of points as is catching a guard while the alarm goes off, and while this all sounds like swapping the identities for familiar Pac-Man staples, Hungry Horace does go a small extra mile by setting its maze game action across four unique mazes.

Hungry Horace’s first maze has some unusual features but does look fairly normal when you first enter it. The single screen area has plenty of walls you’ll need to navigate around, but in the center is a pair of jagged parallel lines that are meant to represent a bridge rising over the rest of the maze. You’re actually able to go underneath the bridge if you so like, but there is one noticeable dead end in the maze. Importantly, that dead end leads you to the first alarm bell you’ll encounter when playing, this first level often fairly easy to navigate even when you encounter it later on as the levels do repeat in a set order. While you may not notice in the first level due to its accommodating design, Hungry Horace also does not require you to do anything while in the maze. You can exit the park and head to the next level no matter how many flowers you’ve scarfed down and there’s no timer to move you along, although beyond perhaps waiting for guards to drop more fruits there’s not much reason to linger. There is, however, the tactical consideration always present that you could just leave a level early if you don’t think you’ll be able to safely go grab any remaining flowers, an idea that could have maybe worked in a high score chaser that doesn’t hit on the problems Hungry Horace encounters.

 

Level 2 is actually the most structurally mundane but sound, the halls and corners arranged in a way where you’ll need to navigate carefully so the guards don’t pop in but it’s not hard to figure out a safe way to get around them. Level 3 is sadly the point where Hungry Horace’s early simplicity and acceptable maze game play is quickly tossed aside in favor of an ill-conceived design. When you enter level 3, there is a high path to take and a low path, but the important factor here is the upper path is entirely linear for a long stretch, far too long for Horace to sprint to the only junction it has, and even then the junction either leads to the exit or the alarm bell. Guards will always appear in the upper path, meaning it is impossible to get around them unless you catch their attention and lead them down below. The bottom path has a loop at the end where you can trap a guard, but many levels have more than one guard and more can appear as back-up over time. It is very likely you’ll need to head up and lure the second guard if not more and then, if the timing doesn’t work out or the guard just decides not to follow properly, you can be stuck in an unwinnable spot between two enemies. On the bright side, when you and a guard make contact, that guard disappears as well so you won’t have to deal with him when you come back to life. On the other hand, sometimes two guards can be right on top of each other and it’s unclear until the heads decide to move in different directions, so even a good luring can sometimes be thrown off when it turns out you had two in pursuit and they’ll now box you in.

The linear path of Level 3 instantly undermines this game’s potential as it seems almost designed to kill you, but sometimes you can slip through and maybe after you trade a life with a guard you move onto the last unique stage design, Level 4.  This stage doesn’t look too bad at first, the player starts in a rather tight corridor and exit from a similar one to leave the level, but despite seemingly being dead ends, they actually teleport you into the entrance or exit of the large central room. Containing many flowers and four small squares, this middle room is very open and worming your way around the guards is the clear challenge, but there’s again an issue with the fact you have to travel a set distance where your only options are moving forwards or backwards. The guards can sometimes refuse to move away from the entry hall, but even worse, they can move to the teleporter and corner you, the player having to watch helplessly as Horace has no way to escape the deadly whim of the park guard. With one guard gone from the trade-off, the stage will be easier to complete than level 3, but Hungry Horace once again feels like it isn’t being designed with much thought as there are points where there will be nothing you could do to avoid failure.

 

In some ways, that unfair design does make the decision on how many flowers you want to eat before leaving a maze more weighty. Reaching a high score will come down to how kind the park guards are feeling in the later two levels, so it might be wise to grab all the flowers in early levels and attempt to use the alarm bell for its scoring potential over its protective purpose. This doesn’t redeem the design in any way, success is still too contingent on poorly designed stages that aren’t even entertaining to play and the early stages don’t have enough oomph, their designs more a relief from the worry caused by entering the game’s less fair levels.

THE VERDICT: As lovable an oddball as Horace is, Hungry Horace won’t be winning many players over with its two early mediocre levels and the later two being death traps. Levels 3 and 4 force a player through halls where they can’t possibly escape the patrolling guards if the enemies decide they want you dead, so lives lost in these stages feel unfairly stolen while the early levels are instead too basic to really pose a threat once you understand them. Letting you leave a level as soon as you reach the exit could have lead to interesting choices made on how many points to grab before departing, but instead Hungry Horace is a gamble on whether the guards will allow you to keep playing and thus the high score chase feels hollow and outside the player’s control.

 

And so, I give Hungry Horace for ZX Spectrum…

A TERRIBLE rating. I considered labeling the game only as Bad since the issues almost entirely arise in stages 3 and 4, but not only do the layouts of the later two mazes make your work in the kinder stages feel inconsequential to your success, but levels 1 and 2 aren’t providing too much themselves. Level 2 you might at least need to pick when you go down a hall, but it’s still pretty straightforward and easy to navigate. If Hungry Horace was just those two levels it still wouldn’t be a good game, it would be tame and fairly easy to earn points in, but adding the two unfair levels after instead turns things into a gamble and your degree of control over your fate is minimal once you start level 3. Getting through multiple loops is a matter mostly of luck and not losing lives save where there’s no other choice but to die. You can clear the four unique levels in Hungry Horace fairly quickly even with the deaths so it could be easy to feel a bit forgiving, but at the same time, just because you can make progress doesn’t mean it was entertaining to do so. It can be shrugged off as harmless if you are just giving it a quick look out of curiosity, but trying to get anything out of it beyond seeing what it is will lead to you running up against the annoying barriers to success and unassuming mediocrity that makes this game’s mix of four levels a bad fit for a maze game.

 

Hungry Horace started as a Pac-Man imitator and tried to mix things up only to not really understand how important the level layouts are in a maze game. Such a rough start for a supposed beloved mascot can make his internet fame seem a bit odd, but Horace’s first venture is not really his most famous. Getting his start gobbling up flowers planted his feet in the gaming world, but it would be picking up a pair of skis that perhaps started turning heads and makes it easier for people to believe he was some sort of representative for the ZX Spectrum. Horace’s popularity has been overblown over time and might make some people go back to see what he’s all about, but it is best to skip the start since pretty much all it offered was an unusual hero who would move onto better things after.