Goofus ain’t Gallant

The game arrived in my office late on a gray evening, comically oversized shoes delivering a squeak with each step taken towards my computer desk. An oddly-proportioned thing, particularly short in the legs, with every visible glimpse of skin caked in bright white greasepaint. The consequences of its arrival remained to be seen, but one thing was transparently clear.

It was time to get silly.

I want to set some expectations for Honked: a clown noir. There’s something about this one, and I don’t know if this is necessarily accurate, that feels incredibly game jam-y. You will stumble into skips, dodgy mechanics, and jank of several varieties. If this game took itself even the slightest bit seriously this could potentially present an issue, but it being a goofy clowntective game does an immense amount to help it.

So you’re a detective, but in the very video-gamey sense where that mostly means clicking through dialogue trees until progress occurs. Said dialogue is pretty great! Characters have distinct voices, do their bits, and set up some cool stuff for later reasonably well. I particularly enjoyed the tightrope tent and the end section, but put a pin in both of those because they’ll be relevant later.

Honked insists that it’s got platformer elements, and it does, but not to the point where it’ll put folks who don’t enjoy run & jump gameplay off. There’s only so much of it and missing a jump never actually matters. That said, it’s definitely fun to move around in, especially once you learn how to blow a balloon into a wheel and careen around like a clown nose in a dryer.

Yeah I should talk about balloons, huh? You get a balloon pump early and learn how to make all kinds of goofy stuff. Almost all of your items are made up in the moment, and this also applies to your ever-expanding moveset. These are cool but I don’t want to oversell the actual balloons themselves; there are a lot of them but most don’t really do anything. They’re just fun! Wonky lil latex guys! Plenty of them are even missable, and that’s honestly not too big of a deal.

This review reads a bit light on detail because I don’t want to spoil Honked. It’s a silly game, but it does have a trick or two up its comically large sleeves that’ll surprise you in its maybe-an-hour runtime and I try to respect the craft. What I will detail is my quest to get both endings, because it was a self inflicted journey through Honked’s rickety inner workings that I could, and arguably should, have avoided which ended up more than doubling my playtime. 

I won’t claim to be a speedrunner, but I’ve enjoyed a skip and a route from time to time. Honked’s zippy movement and skippable cutscenes/dialogue had me thinking I could get to the point of no return in record time. I was mostly right! Tons of stuff is skippable, especially once you get ahold of the key movement tools, and it’s legitimately satisfying to fly around figuratively and literally. What I ended up learning is that you can’t skip all the non-key NPCs.

It’s not a spoiler to say that the second to last section has a small obstacle course you need to navigate. One of the sections has tightropes! Tightrope mechanics are taught to you in the tent we put a pin in earlier, and I’m yanking that pin right out of the wall now. They don’t spawn in there until you talk to a different NPC who gives you the spiel, and it turns out that’s true for every tightrope in the game. Imagine my surprise when I find out that my clever maneuvering to complete the tent without touching a single rope would be my own downfall as I arrived in the aforementioned second to last area and stared at a massive gap fully missing the means of traversal. Whoops!

So with my lesson learned I ran it again, this time taking a moment to talk to the sword swallower and poof all the world’s ropes into existence. Got through the obstacle course, got through chatter, all was set up to complete the game’s other ending! And in the interest of speeding it up a bit I moved a macguffin that I won’t detail to make the wrapup go faster.

This was a mistake. This made it so I could only achieve the ending I already had. Fuck. FUCK! This silly fucking game was kicking my ass and it was doing it entirely by accident! I was getting honked upon! I was the punchline!

Long story made not much shorter at all, I ran it a fourth time and didn’t fuck it up again. It wasn’t worth it! My initial instincts were right and that first ending was better! Granted both are short, the game just kinda stops, but I just had to know. I am the farthest thing from a professional and I am nothing if not stubbornly persistent, but I wouldn’t have done all this if I didn’t enjoy myself despite…myself.

In summary, Honked honked me good and hard thru my jorts. See you at AGDQ I guess.

6/10