Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Good show!

The Nintendo DS has two screens, so players could play two games at once, right? Something going on up top and something else going on down below. I mean, kids these days are smart enough for that, aren't they?

I'm fairly sure such a line of thought wasn't what spurred the development of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, but that's sort of what's going on, with the thankfully added benefit of pausing between both games, a platformer up top and a puzzler down below.

Henry Hatsworth is on the hunt for a dapper gold suit, but the adventure to get it will be unlike anything you've played before. Tea time's over, gentlemen. Onwards!

Fun Times

Henry Hatsworth is an old English gentleman, the kind with the means to explore the world for ancient treasures and the ignorance of their importance to the locals. Outside of gaming, you could imagine him as not thinking twice about tomb-raiding, bringing a sarcophagus back from his travels to Egypt and proudly displaying it in a club that the poor and the women can't access. But he's our hero in The Puzzling Adventure.

All our characters speak like they've taken vocal coaching lessons from Banjo and Kazooie, only this time it doesn't sound too stupid, and Henry scoffs and wobbles and grumbles and By Joves his way through a sentence, with his knowledgable assistant, of sorts, Cole, getting his childish cockney across as well.

The game kicks off with the search for the Golden Hat of the magical suit of which legends speak. It's a short platforming tutorial on the top screen where we learn that Henry is surprisingly agile despite his looks.

Henry only cares about the colour of this hat, however. All the myths regarding its power are irrelevant, though things are soon to take a turn towards the unexpected...

Wormholes have pierced through into our world, wormholes leading to a puzzle dimension full of coloured blocks, a dimension with some goofy looking enemies pouring out, ready to tackle whoever gets in their way. What horrors have we unleashed upon ourselves?

Having been turned from an old gentleman into a young adventurer thanks to this magic hat, Henry is ready to believe that there is more to this suit than the fact that it's gold, and it's Cole, with his nose deep into books, of all things, that can spill the beans on what's going on.

Here's where the puzzle part of the adventure comes in. Block switching and match three games are nothing new to anyone who has been following along with the 1001 list, and The Puzzling Adventure is essentially just that. Match three or more coloured blocks to remove them from the grid.

The annoying part in this otherwise rather simple game is that you can only switch blocks horizontally. If you want to change the row a block is in, you've got to try and find a way to make it switch over a cliff, so to speak, so that it falls under gravity to the row below. That orange block on the top row could be swapped with the empty space above the yellow block with no problem. Swap it with another empty block to its right and it'll now be above a gap, and will fall on top of the enemy block.

This is the only way to manipulate blocks between rows, and I was having a tough time mentally trying to get that done.

Get used to it I'd have to because the whole point of The Puzzling Adventure is to be good at both the platforming and the puzzling so that the actions in one affect the actions in the other.

If you defeat an enemy in the platformer, it is sent into the puzzle grid, ready to be defeated once and for all. To do so, you need to swap screens with the press of a button and get your match-three skills fired up.

However, you've only got a limited amount of time in this puzzle grid to do anything before you're thrown back into the platformer. To get more time, you need to defeat more enemies. More enemies mean more blocks that will need to be removed before they can be defeated for good.

You can start to see how this bizarre little idea is coming together.

It continues, of course. Defeating enemies in the puzzle, as well as just matching blocks, with or without power-ups, will fill up your power meter which allows you to make use of ranged weapons in the platformer.

If you're low on power, you've got to get up close and personal and batter people in melee combat, risking your health that much more in the process - but defeating more enemies will fill up the time bar on the left, giving you more to time to match blocks and fill up your power bar before coming back into the platformer full of ammo again.

This connectivity is so important that there is even a mechanic where you can fire a shot at something then dive into the puzzle to match some blocks and charge that shot up so that it is even more powerful when it comes time to switch back to the platformer.

If you do really well, you have the option of triggering Tea Time. I bet you want to know what that does, don't you? And I bet you won't guess correctly, either.

You get strapped into a limited-time use robot suit that can stomp and jump around the battlefield, obviously. Find the massive treasure chest at the end of the level, collect all the gold and gems you can stuff into your pockets, and that's The Puzzling Adventure in a nutshell.

We're introduced to a Mr Weasleby, who absolutely screams villain of the piece, another adventurer out for riches, and now racing against us to find the remaining pieces of the magical golden suit. Who will be the more prepared gentleman?

Probably him. We can splash our wealth on some upgrades to the amount of time we can spend in the puzzle grid, but Weasleby here can spend funds on floating steampunk top-hats. It's a pretty good fight, having to jump and dodge his attacks, firing back to chip away at his health bar, but inevitably having to pause the action to remove some blocks to power up for another round of attacks.

It actually took me three attempts, but we'll not talk about that. I had to walk into things to learn what was lethal or not. That's my defence and I'm sticking to it.

Coming up to the hour mark and I was staring at what looked like the last level of this first world. Would there be another suit piece right around the corner? How many have I got to find, again? Who else wants to come and fight me for them?

Final Word

All these questions would have to wait because while I liked Henry Hatsworth, I didn't like like it. I was emulating it and had more than a few instances of pressing the wrong buttons at the wrong time, but that wasn't really my main problem.

You can easily enjoy both platformers and puzzle games, but sometimes you want to play a platformer and sometimes you want to play a puzzler. When I made a little progress in the platformer, I'd want to play the puzzler, but I'd usually want to play the puzzler for more time than I had available to play the puzzler.

Because the two and so connected, you can't really favour one over the other. You'll be kicked out of the puzzler when you run out of time, and running out of power in the platformer necessitates hopping into the puzzler. You could push through as far as you dare, but the puzzle will continue filling up and enemy blocks will reach the top of the screen and emerge into the platformer.

It's a great mechanic, don't get me wrong, but I usually felt like I was spending ten seconds in each screen before needing to switch when I wanted to spend thirty.

I suppose getting used to it and learning a little bit more about how it works may change my view on that, but would I want to play more? Well, yes, I would. I'm not a massive fan, but the art style and the voice-work, minimal though it is, makes Henry Hatsworth stand out, to the point where it's almost too good-looking for the Nintendo DS, though that shows you just how far removed I've been from that handheld.

I don't know when I'll get back to it, or how long I'll stick at it, but there's no denying that Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure should be played because you can't really name too many successful genre mash-ups, can you? Not with such a contrast between the two, at least.

Maybe I'll end up wanting more from it, but I won't know until I put the Golden Hat back on and find the rest of the worlds shiniest outfit. After tea, of course.

Fun Facts

An early title, and presumably theme, was Monkey Business. I would definitely have put more time into playing this kind of game were monkeys to be the lead characters.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, developed by EA Tiburon, first released in 2009.

Version played: Nintendo DS, 2009, via emulation.