The unassuming and hard-to-read achievement system, tucked away on a tabbed menu, is perhaps the main one. The real progression comes from elsewhere. To be fair, the odd villager has a personality of note (Hokko Life seems to be a haven for lonely, sad individuals), but they are mostly there to wander about and make the game seem busy. You can indeed grow your village, but they are – mostly – characterless and determined by some kind of unseen algorithm. It felt like a neat twist: a farming sim where you grow a village, rather than a well-manicured plot.īut this was a red herring. By gathering resources in your little sunny glade, you can build houses and then move them in, generating something of a neighbourhood. They sit in the local restaurant, arriving at the end of the trainline, much like you (we imagined that Hokko was Limbo, and these were souls that needed saving from oblivion).
We expected progression to come from housing the many villagers who arrive in Hokko. There are answers out there, but not in the places you might expect. Whenever we’ve fallen asleep on a train, we’ve had to make do with a bench in a train station car park, trying to ignore the wee and seagulls.īut what you actually do, once you have a house, is something of an enigma. Having fallen asleep on a train and arrived in the humble Hokko village, you are handed a full-blown house, which is not something you’d expect in the current economic climate. The big heads and lean, human bodies, particularly of the rabbits, gave us the willies. These animal-tronics lack animations or expressions, so they come across more like furries than feasible characters. The characters in Hokko Life are Animal Crossing by way of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
If we were being unkind, it doesn’t feel much like a Team17 game at all. It makes Hokko Life a little on the disappointing side, as it is more humdrum and uninspiring than it is innovative. Hokko Life is published by Team17: a cheeky, puckish publisher who makes us smile just as much as they innovate.
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