Helheim Hassle

To quote the philosopher Dante Alighieri: "Hell No!" To its credit, the creative gameplay managed to be entertaining for several hours despite several sources of annoyance: - The talking, with certain characters constantly yapping in an unbearable voice; like Baldr, or the Bolivian skeleton that follows and pesters you everywhere. Were the writing successfully funny, these actors would still extinguish any laughing mood. - The controls, which make limb selection and manipulation tedious, convoluted, instead of providing combination shortcuts. It's even worse with contextual commands sharing the same controller buttons. Endless confusion, failures, and wondering what part is currently selected. - Timers, which make limb selection and manipulation horrendous, but ruin only optional sections for quite some time. Like the sewer robot, which you can skip simply by leaving the room once you see the "puzzle" setup and how miserable the next hours of your life are going to be if you go on with the challenge. But then what I dreaded would happen happens: A timer in a mandatory bottleneck finally ruins everything and annihilates all player interest. Which is, by their nature, the only thing timers are good at doing. As in earlier cases, the design botch multiplies the inadequacies of the controls, and is accompanied by incessant hysterical screaming from an amateur actor. This time though, it's either endure the torture or go play a better game. To quote the philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli: "Don't mix puzzles and timers. Ever. Or else..."