Review for Highly Likely
Highly Likely is not a fun game. And I struggle even to use the term “game” to describe it. I considered “interactive storybook,” but it's not a fun one of those either. It's a great showcase of art design and voice-over work. The 2D side-scrolling adventure by Mikola Games is hand-drawn with a unique Eastern-European art style that makes it really stand out and had me excited to try it. It's also an interesting folk story with unique and likable characters. But as far as a game that you take time to sit and “play?” All that happens is as follows: You use a controller or keyboard to walk left or right until an object or piece of the background glows yellow. You press the interact button on that object. The story progresses. That's about it.
You guide a hapless would-be farmer named Mikola, who has been living happily with his wife (referred to only as “Wife”) on a little homestead in the Ukrainian countryside. In the opening sequence, you’ll learn that they have lately begun to dream of vacationing abroad, soaking in the sun in some tropical locale. This cut-scene is a pretty slideshow of well-drawn still images animated with small amounts of movement. It's largely in black and white, with tasteful splashes of color for emphasis (the game itself is in full color), and is narrated by a charming, silky male voice who even does voices for the characters like he's reading a storybook. Mikola and his wife decide, in pursuit of their travel goals, to take a loan from the bank and grow a large-yield crop to raise some money. Unfortunately, their dreams die in front of them as their field floods, ruining their seeds.
You begin play in the dire situation of having to pay back your loan to an increasingly impatient bank with no capital or resources with which to do so – a promising start for an interesting story. But this is where the problems begin. Using either a controller or keyboard, you can slowly walk left or right on a 2D plane, with no much-needed run option. You can also move forward and backward slightly, but it's not really useful in any way. The Narrator describes what you'll be doing. He mentions you will pick up a bone. So you do. The bone enters an inventory that sits in the bottom-left corner. Then he mentions you will go for a walk in the woods. So you walk right until you leave the screen, and you're in the woods. Then you walk right until the Narrator tells you you're finished walking in the woods. Then you walk left. This is not just a slow start; this is the game.
The ensuing narrative involves Mikola finding a clever way to make money by stealing oil from abandoned state-owned oil pipes and using his illegal moonshine still to process it into gasoline. He then carts the gasoline across the river, where his brother will pay him top dollar for the fuel. The venture becomes increasingly difficult for Mikola as the game goes on, because national security is tightening and travel is becoming more restrictive. Mikola must become more clever, crafting more and more schemes to deal with the issue of encroaching government security while attempting to repay his loan. Beyond that, Mikola runs into other issues like thieves, lying to his wife, errands he must run, and other various obstacles that stand in his way. In many adventure games, the obstacles that present themselves are the fun parts, presenting opportunities for puzzles and perhaps variations to the gameplay. This is not the case in Highly Likely.
There are very few puzzles to solve here, to the extent that when problems present themselves, you're often just walking and waiting for the Narrator to either explain what to do next, or simply say, “Mikola had an idea” and walking left or right until Mikola executes his idea independent of any input from you, the player. If you're lucky, you may get to hit the interact button, but that's not even always guaranteed. This streamlining is stretched to the point of absurdity on one occasion when the Narrator presents you with the quandary: “Whatever will Mikola do?” The solution is to literally walk left and then right a couple times as the Narrator says, “He paced and paced trying to think up a solution,” and then suddenly informs you the great idea Mikola had! Which, incidentally, is to walk several screens away, hit the interact button, and walk back.
This is not to say that the game spells everything out for you. It is possible to miss things. As you become so used to the narration walking you through every step, it's rather disorienting when you find yourself with no instructions. You’ll assume that you've done all you can and attempt to walk to another screen but this time the exit won’t light up. (Rather than being one continuously scrolling setting, there are about two dozen locations that each take about a full minute to walk from end to end, as the background scrolls along with your character. To move from one to another, there is typically some landmark that lights up when you near it, and interacting will take you to wherever the game decides you need to go next. You see a map, but you never get to choose your destination. If you are not yet supposed to exit the location, the landmark will not light up and you cannot move on.)
Whenever this happens and you don't know what to do, it may be that you forgot to pick up some item that the Narrator didn't tell you about. Or you didn't perform some menial task that you weren't told to do. A particularly heinous example of this was after I discovered the first oil pipe, when the Narrator said something to the effect of, “It was time for Mikola to return home.” So I walked for 30-40 seconds to the edge of the forest, but the exit didn't light up. I walked the 30-40 seconds back and found that a small shrub was now lit up. So I clicked to interact and Mikola picked it up. I thought “Oh, maybe I'm supposed to cover the oil pipe so no one else finds it,” which I did, by cycling through my inventory items until Mikola was holding it. Then I walked all the way to the exit again. Still no light-up. I supposed I missed something else, so I walked back. This time a small stick was highlighted. Turns out I had to pick up and move seven or eight different pieces of detritus, one by one and only in a specific order, until the game allowed me to leave the scene.
This game is not fun.
Highly Likely also contains a number of mini-games which appear as parts of certain tasks. The distilling process is an example of this, as you must place logs in the still at the appropriate intervals so as to not cause an explosion due to overheating. This is far from difficult and also not fun, but if you do manage to mess it up, you will get a “Game Over” and have to do it all again. You can die or fail in a number of ways throughout. Many are obvious and easily avoidable, but some are not. You can be shot, blown up, eaten by an animal, crash a train, and I'm sure there were others I didn't experience. And each time you have to do the same long monotonous task you were doing leading up to that moment over again. For example, there is a section where you must use a hand-cranked ferry to take you across a river. The game makes you hold the left stick (or mouse button) down for a full minute of your actual human life to turn the crank, but then, if you don't do one specific thing you were warned about perhaps an hour earlier, a dog can kill you. If this happens, you have to perform that whole sequence again. And even if you don't get killed by the dog, you will have to re-do the ferry sequence three more times in the course of the game anyway.
This is not the only instance of repetition. The distillation mini-game is also done three times, including a lead-up sequence of dropping a bucket, chopping wood, and collecting each individual piece of wood you chopped from the ground. That's in addition to the tedium experienced in walking back and forth between locations. The game is extraordinarily linear, to the point where any items you need to collect will not be collectible until you need them and the Narrator explains that they’re required. So you may go into the barn, collect a tool, and walk two screens to use it, only for the Narrator to explain that you forgot a second tool, walk back, collect the tool, and return. This sequence will take you several minutes and cannot be avoided by picking up all the tools in the first place. They, unfathomably, want you to do this. The game seems to think it will be fun for the player to do this. It is not.
What’s arguably worse is that the game squanders its most vibrant setting with a series of dull fetch quests that present zero challenge and made me hate the scene by the time I left it. This sequence sees Mikola visit a fair to purchase a new wheel for his cart. It's beautifully drawn and full of lively and amusing things going on in the background; definitely the most energetic setting in the entire game. You’ll stroll at your usual slow speed the entire ninety-second length of the fair to locate a wheel Mikola decides he will steal. A pictograph appears above his head in a thought bubble showing you the tool you must use. Whether or not you were eagle-eyed enough to spot it on your way in, the tool is close to the opposite end of the return trip. There, through a second pictograph, you discover that the shopkeeper in possession of the tool wants something in trade. Start roaming again until you find that, only to learn that its owner wants five discrete other items in exchange, all of which are stationed at various booths around the fair. And each of those object owners wants another thing in trade, which all involve mini-games to acquire. I won't go into details about these mini-games, except for one with an easel and a paintbrush that must be moved at a glacial pace across the canvas as you draw randomly for at least two minutes until you begin to ask yourself “Do I have to fill up this whole thing?” just before the sequence suddenly ends.
Now, you’re probably wondering if is there anything redeeming about this experience, and the answer is undoubtedly yes! Big time. The art really is fantastic. While the animation is a bit stiff, the visual design itself is incredible. The backgrounds and character models truly look like they could have been taken from a Caldecott Medal-winning children's picture book. Highly Likely presents stunning portraits of rural life in a setting rarely explored in games. The characters are uniquely drawn and full of soul, from the drunken gossip who serves as the town mail carrier to the sly and slightly insane apple farmer. Even the lighting and weather effects, like fog rolling in during nighttime sequences, are impressively attractive. Whenever I was stuck pushing the left control stick for large chunks of time as I traversed communal farms, a bee-yard, swamps, fields and forests, I'd at least get to amuse myself by studying the intricate graphic detail.
And the Narrator is perfect. His soothing, mellow voice has just enough personality to make everything he says sound interesting. He does all the character voices in a subtle way that made me feel like I was watching Reading Rainbow again. The biggest problem with the voice-overs is that many narrated lines of dialogue are followed by an extremely long pause as the characters continue to move their lips in silence. This may be specific to the English language dub, but the pauses are much longer than you would reasonably expect, and they seem to get worse as the game goes along. While the Narrator does a great job with his actual performance, the dead air in between each line makes it hard to connect with the conversations.
A largely atmospheric soundscape does a good job of accompanying the action. Through chirping crickets, crunching footsteps, whistling birds, and the sounds of a light breeze, it is easy to feel immersed in the pastoral environments. While the treks through them may be tiresome, the settings themselves never are. Various moments are emphasized with light, folksy little musical stings played on flutes and harps and other acoustic instruments. Between the art and audio, every moment of this game creates a pleasant ambiance from a purely presentational standpoint.
For all it does wrong, and the number of times I was tempted to stop playing it, I did find myself grinning during the game's final cut-scene, satisfied with the ending of the story and the struggles of Mikola, our hard-luck hero. But the utter disregard shown for my time to get to that point marred the entire experience. There is just no game here. Indeed, this did not need to be a game. The creators are obviously brimming with enthusiasm and creativity and artistic talent, but it would have been put to better use crafting a cartoon or a play or a children's storybook, not awkwardly interrupting it with monotonous “gameplay” mechanics that contribute nothing and indeed actually detract from the experience.
I’d like to find something positive to close with, but I just can't in good conscience recommend spending time on this game unless the developers put a lot of work into moving things along by shortening walking distances, increasing walking speed, eliminating odd pauses, and taking out some of the repetition and backtracking. Even then, however, it would be left with the excessive hand-holding instead of letting players actually explore and think and solve puzzles for themselves. As it stands now, throughout its five or so total hours of play time, all you get is a beautifully illustrated, amusingly narrated short story that drags you through it slowly and laboriously without any real payoff. If you like the art and the setting, unfortunately you will get far more enjoyment looking at screenshots than you will from playing Highly Likely.
