There is a story to discover by finding scraps of paper and listening to voicemail messages. There are some jump scares, and some chases. So for $3 this is actually a pretty fun game. A small part of me hopes that there is a better game hidden behind that door, but there is no way I am going to ever find out. The thing is, that right at the start of the game, it basically puts you in front of a locked door and tells you the only way to open it is to find all 100 canisters. As I mentioned earlier Hanwell is actually very large, and the thought of searching every inch of it does nothing for me. There is nothing to help you locate them other than the small hum when you are within a few feet of one. One collectible in particular is finding 100 canisters hidden throughout the town. There are three types of collectables, but honestly after completing the game I couldn’t care less about finding them. Really that is the whole goal of the game. The main point of the game is to collect six pieces of an identification card, hidden in six different (and unlabeled on the map) buildings in order to enter yet another building and fight the boss. Unfortunately this happens only for a few minutes, so once it is done, it’s over. It is not fully explained as to how you got this ability but if you try not to think about it too much I didn’t mind this new twist. At one point you get blinded and need to use a sonar style gameplay which allows you to “see” for a brief second but also gives your position away. You have a block and attack button, but most enemies will come straight for you making them a very minor inconvenience, except for those spawning enemies which really suck once they come at you in droves. I also like B-Horror movies for this very reason. It is passable, but one character in particular is extremely overacted.Īgain, this game feels like it is trying very hard to be something better than it is and I can’t fault it for that. The dialogue audio is very dialed in, by which I mean that any dialogue is actually heard on answering machines and voice mail. You are giving a radio that you can use to let you know when enemies are nearby, but these spawning enemies give you no warning which eliminates the usefulness of this tool. This gets really frustrating when for the last third of the game you have enemies that literally spawn right in front of you in order to prevent you from walking anywhere unless you can dodge them. Now later in the game you do encounter one or two enemies outdoors, but by that point it seems like the weapons all disappeared. And once you leave the building, the weapon you dropped is gone. So I hope you enjoyed holding that sword that you didn’t use at all. The game literally make you chose to drop your weapon before entering any building. Unfortunately even though you are well armed, enemies are few and far between outdoors, and once you try to enter any building you are forced to drop your weapon and go in bare handed. Most of these are just lying in the middle of the road which brings up the question of why so many residents laid down their swords before leaving? Also why are there so many swords?
Just walking down the road I came across seven crowbars, three cricket bats, a scythe and three long swords. The funny thing about this game is that there are weapons everywhere. That is until you realize just how empty it is. While the layout isn’t straight forward, it does make exploration somewhat interesting. The actual town of Hanwell is actually pretty large and well done. Think the original Resident Evil, and Silent Hill games, but made as a high school computer science class assignment. Welcome to Hanwell is like a poorly written grade-school love letter to better survival horror games it tries to emulate. Are there worse ways to spend $3? Sure, but there are also a lot of better ways as well. I picked this one up when it went on sale at the eShop for around $3. So hopefully this will help you if you stumbled across this review and wonder if this game is worth your time and money. If you are reading this, then like me you went to Steam to read a review of this game since there is so little info about it out there. If you bought this for Steam and wonder how it is on the Nintendo Switch, here are my thoughts. Welcome to Hanwell, Nintendo Switch Review.
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