izigame.me

First, a little ethos-building: I'm a horror game fanatic. Any title boasting even a whiff of creepy atmosphere, sign me up. Cardboard-creaky monsters, cliched storylines, monumentally dumb protagonists? I don't care, sign me up. I also regularly champion indie games. I've played my fair share and count several of them among my absolute favorites. I've played, and loved, so many "bad" games, I even write a blog as testament:
https://wkduffy.wordpress.com/
Now that's done, you can probably see what I'm about to say from a mile away: I'm going to have to give Hektor an enthusiastic thumbs down. Ouch! It's hurts me more than it hurts you.
The main problem here is the translation from idea to actual gameplay, in my opinion. Hektor is (or was, at launch) much touted as "that game where the environment keeps changing all around you like a big head trip." Well, this is true; hallways twist and turn, sometimes evaporating into thin air behind you when you're not looking. Familiar doors appear in front of you, and suddenly you find yourself walking through a deja-vu loop of hallway-room-hallway-room, straight out of some Twilight Zone episode. I'm trapped inside a room, that's inside a room, that's inside a room! AHH!! Or do a 180 to reveal that the path you just traversed has turned into a dead end brick wall.
OK, cool. But when the environments are all incredibly samey (I mean, you pretty much have identical sets of dirty white concrete hallways, closets, wooden desks and doors ad nauseum here--you will NOT find any smidge of variety in this game whatsoever), the long-term effect of this constantly shifting environment...lands with a thud. Who cares? It all looks the same anyway--what does it matter if it's shifting about willy nilly? It ends up not being interesting nor creating any real sense of confusion, tension, mystery, or horror. Darn it.
In fact, it engenders the opposite...a nagging feeling of ennui. I literally found myself saying out loud:
"Clearly, it doesn't matter which hallway or door I choose, which direction I turn, or what I do. The game ends up sending me where it needs to in order for me to progress. I don't need to memorize locations or anything. All I really need to do is just push the thumbstick forward and the game will build itself around me until I get to the end." Yup, pretty much sums it up.
I'm surprised the developers didn't consider this possible effect before committing to this questionable design decision. Talk about alienating your player.
Next, if you take that effect and add to it the fact that the "predator" stalking you throughout the game can kill you upon sight (you have no way to defend yourself; nor can you outrun it; nor can you even effectively hide from it--seriously, there's nothing you can do but stand there and wait for the game to kill you and restart)...well, you end up having absolutely no connection to what is happening, no sense of agency, no sense that any of your actions matter at all. And the puppet-like predator loses all sense of horror the second time you see it--and you will see it repeatedly as it hacks away at you robotically before the screen goes dark. I try not to play the "comparison game" too often honestly, but in this case for some reason, I couldn't help but think how far, far, far away Hektor is in quality from anything Frictional has ever created (for instance). These developers don't have "it," and I don't see them finding "it" any time soon.
As a note-picking-up simulator that attempts to tell a shadowy covert-government-sponsored-brainwashing story (I guess?), it has some pretty well done voice acting. And the music is so suitably depressing (and professionally recorded), I assumed it was simply canned music from some licensed collection. But it appears the sounds were recorded specifically for the game. Kudos on that.
But it's not compelling enough (or properly fleshed out enough) as a narrative to make you care about it or the poor souls inhabiting this world. Hektor tries to do some interesting things, but it's a weak, weak indie. And what the heck does Hektor mean, anyway? That's the flavor which was left in my mouth after the final cutscene played followed by the credits. A weak, meandering fog of...nothing, really.