Hohokum

Most games tell you what to do in the first thirty seconds. Hohokum barely tells you anything, and it means to.

The UK studio Honeyslug made it with illustrator Richard Hogg. It first shipped in 2014 as a Sony-published title on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. Eight years later, Annapurna Interactive brought it to PC on July 28, 2022, priced at $9.99. That publisher fits. Annapurna has built a catalogue of personal, art-first games that sell on mood more than mechanics, and Hohokum fits that catalogue neatly.

The idea is simple. You control the Long Mover, a creature shaped like a kite and a snake, and you glide through a chain of hand-drawn worlds linked by portals. There are no enemies, no timers and no fail states. You don’t shoot or jump, and you rarely solve anything that looks like a puzzle. You touch things. You loop around them. The world responds, often with a small, funny animation that invites a look at what else reacts.

That puts Hohokum in an awkward spot. The critical reception was famously split, and the split tells you something. People who meet Hohokum on its own terms tend to love it. People who expect a game with clear goals and a sense of progress tend to find it pretty and pointless.

The real question isn’t whether Hohokum is good. It’s whether you want a game that works more like a toy than a series of challenges. The answer decides how the whole thing lands.

• No-fail exploration: You can’t die, lose or run out of time. The game never punishes you, so there’s nothing to be tense about.
• Worlds that react to touch: You interact by touching and circling things. You might give villagers joyrides, light lanterns, help out at a wedding, or start a festival or a fruit harvest.
• Hidden goals: Loose objectives, such as tracking down your lost Long Mover friends, are scattered across the worlds. The game rarely points them out.
• Richard Hogg’s art direction: Every world is flat, bold and hand-illustrated, and each has its own palette and personality.
• Ghostly International soundtrack: The music comes from artists on the Ghostly International label and changes as you play, reacting to what you do.
• Worlds linked by portals: The game is a set of connected spaces rather than a line of levels, so you can wander in whatever order you like.

The Gameplay Loop: Poke, Watch, Repeat

Hohokum’s core loop is about as small as a loop can be. You move, you touch something, and something happens. The Long Mover is built for smooth flight, and its trailing body is designed to make even aimless steering feel pleasant. The loop works because the reactions are specific and funny rather than generic. A villager doesn’t just flash when touched. They climb on and ride along. A lantern doesn’t just switch on. It becomes part of a bigger chain you only notice once you’ve lit a few more.

This is where Hohokum is strongest. Each world reads like a small illustrated joke with the punchline hidden. Finding that punchline offers a quiet kind of satisfaction most games bury under XP bars and popups. Setting off a wedding or a harvest feels like something you found yourself, not something you were handed.

Onboarding Friction by Design

The same design is also its biggest weakness. Hohokum has almost no onboarding. It doesn’t tell you what the goals are, show you how close you are to finishing, or tell you when you’ve done everything a world has to offer. The Long Mover friends you’re supposedly rescuing are a thin thread, and the game rarely hints at how to find them.

Early on, that vagueness is a feature. Experimentation is the default, and the discoveries feel earned. Later, the same vagueness becomes friction. Once a world has been circled a few times and nothing new happens, there’s no way to tell whether a trigger was missed or the place is already finished. Hohokum doesn’t tell you, and it doesn’t care. That is exactly where many critics say the game turns tedious, and the design supports their case. Near the end, the difference between exploring and searching for the one thing you missed gets very thin.

Toy or Game?

Some reviewers called Hohokum an “interactive screensaver”. That’s partly fair and partly lazy. It’s fair because the game doesn’t have the structure most people mean when they say “game”: no escalating challenge, no skill curve, and very little sense of mastery. There’s nothing to get better at — you just learn more of its secrets.

It’s lazy because a screensaver doesn’t reward attention, and Hohokum does. The systems in each world connect in ways that demand noticing and testing, the same way you learn a physical toy by playing with it. The comparison that fits best isn’t a screensaver. It’s a pop-up book you can fly through. Take it on those terms and the lack of challenge stops looking like something missing and starts looking like the point.

Pacing and Session Design

Hohokum is built for short, loose sessions: twenty or thirty minutes, one or two worlds, then stop. Long stretches expose the thin progression and make the late-game grind harder to ignore. The absence of fail states makes it a natural fit for winding down in the evening, and the soundtrack helps. It’s the rare game designed to lower your heart rate. The price of that design is momentum. Nothing pulls you back except your own curiosity. When that runs out, the game is effectively over, whether or not you’ve found every secret.

Where the Design Earns Its Keep

The late-game problems don’t cancel what Hohokum gets right. Its best moments come from the worlds reacting to you, not from goals being ticked off, and those moments hold up years after the original release. Most games still treat play as something to finish. Hohokum treats it as something to enjoy for its own sake, and that stance is its most lasting contribution.

Richard Hogg’s art is the main reason to play, and it hasn’t aged at all. The style is flat, graphic and bright, with strong shapes, bold color blocks and character designs that look like the best of mid-century picture books. Because it doesn’t aim for realism, it has nothing to date it. The 2014 original looks as fresh on a modern PC monitor as it did on a PS4.

The art does real work in the design, too. Since the game won’t explain itself, the art has to hint at what’s interactive, and it mostly succeeds: clear silhouettes and sharp contrast make interesting things stand out. It fails where the game’s vagueness is worst, in scenes busy enough that you can’t tell what’s scenery and what can be touched.

The interface is almost nonexistent. There’s no persistent HUD and the menus are minimal, which suits the tone but leaves you with nothing to track progress. Technically, a hand-illustrated 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and there’s little to tune.

The Ghostly International soundtrack is just as important. The electronic, dreamy music shifts as you play, so the audio feels tied to what you’re doing rather than playing underneath it. It carries a lot of the calm mood, especially in the later stretches where the design starts to sag.

On Steam, how you control Hohokum matters more than it would for most slow-paced games. The game was designed for PlayStation controllers, and the Long Mover’s smooth, curving flight is built around analog steering. A gamepad is the natural choice. Gradual curves and wide loops around objects feel best with a thumbstick, where you can steer by degrees.

Keyboard input is on/off by nature, which works against a game about smooth, flowing movement. On a desk setup, a controller is the sensible pick before starting. It’s a small change, but it makes a real difference to how the game feels.

The low hardware demands, the pad-first design and the short-session pacing also make Hohokum a strong fit for handheld PC play. Check the Steam store page for the current Steam Deck rating before buying with that in mind. The PC version is otherwise a straightforward way to play a game that was stuck on PlayStation for eight years.

Hohokum knows exactly what it wants to be and doesn’t compromise. That’s why it’s lovely, and also why it’s hard to recommend to most people. Richard Hogg’s art and the reactive Ghostly International soundtrack give it more personality than most big-budget games, and its refusal to punish you makes it one of the most calming things you can play on a PC.

Its lack of guidance, though, isn’t only a style choice. It’s a real usability problem, and it gets worse the longer you play. The late game shows how thin the structure is, and players who need a reason to keep going won’t find one. We recommend it only to those willing to play it like a toy, in short sessions and without worrying about finishing it. Anyone expecting a traditional game should look elsewhere.