Hiveswap Friendsim

Point-and-click games have been around for quite a long time, especially when it comes to PC games. Thanks to games like Monkey Island, it became a very popular genre for a long time. The simplistic gameplay style allows for the developers to create a big and interactive story. There are plenty of fans of Andrew Hussie's work, after all these series of webcomics have been around for quite a while now. So when you combine the two of them u surely will have a select group of people very interested. Hiveswap Friendsim is exactky that, but does the game actually deliver to that special audience? Well, let's talk about that.

About the game

Starting the game you just crash-landed on Alternia and you’re just desperate to make some friends. But friends may not be the only thing you should keep an eye out for, as there are plenty of, as some aliens are approaching.

As we've mentioned before, the game is a point-and-click adventure, but there's much than that. The gameplay mechanics are also heavily based on visual novels, it plays out like a dating/friendship simulator, as the name implies. You will have to befriend aliens if you want to survive, but you might even, somehow, find love there.

Episodic adventure

In the style of many visual novels, the game is divided by episodes, but sadly they are not all included in one game. They act basically as downloadable content, so if you want to get more than a couple of hours of the visual novel you will have to pay extra. Still, there's not much to worry about, it's not like the game is expensive or anything, and the downloadable content is also cheap.

The first episode only offers a choice between befriending two completely different aliens. They have entirely different personalities and thus the interactions are incredibly different, this also adds a lot of replayability to the game. You can do a run where you befriend one and then a different one to befriend the other one. In the other episodes, there's a lot of new content, and many more aliens to befriend. There are plenty of interactions and different routes you can take, so feel free to experiment and be as friendly as you can.

There isn’t much to say about Hiveswap Friendsim, it is a pretty small game, and it is even smaller if we only talk about the first chapter. Since you can get to pick the route of the game, the story will vary between different walkthroughs of the game. It is as basic as date/friend simulators can be with nothing really special about it.

If you're a fan of the artist you'll surely enjoy the game, but for a complete outsider, it's hard to recommend. It's short, the user interface is basic, there aren't many characters, and the list goes on.

Pros

• Good looking
• Nice original soundtrack
• Cool characters

Cons

• As basic as can be
• Small
• Too many DLCs
• A little repetitive