Retro Throwback Saturday Spotlight - Horace
It ought to be a stone-cold classic, and this unique conversation with the past, present and future of gaming is a vastly overlooked story-driven platformer with excellent mechanics and tons of ideas.
Retro Throwback Saturday Spotlight is a weekly bonus feature where I’ll highlight a modern game that captures the style and feel of some of the retro games we’re highlighting in this series. While I’ll feature some games that are emerging or well-known, I’ll also include some that are a little bit off the beaten path!
GENRE: Platform adventure
RELEASE DATE: 2019
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Paul Helman / 505 Games
PLATFORMS: Windows, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
NOTE: I have a lot to say about Horace, so I’ve saved it for a holiday weekend where I’m hopeful readers might have more time available to read through it. My tl;dr summary of the lengthy piece below is this:
“Horace is a modern classic that doesn’t just open up a dialogue with the games of the past, but provides a life-long biography that explores why games are just as important as any other form of art or pop culture. You should play it immediately.”
Paul Helman is an indie game developer with just one game to his name – the platform adventure Horace, a sprawling (mostly) sidescrolling pixel art title that spans not just the entire life of the titular robot the player controls, but which also covers several decades’ worth of gameplay styles and pop culture references as well as centuries of art and music. Helman spent seven years creating it mostly by himself, and it’s definitely a game that reflects the personal touch of an auteur creator. It’s one of the slowest burn games I’ve ever played in terms of its initial storytelling and pacing and it’s also infamous for being quite challenging in places, but it grows on you so much by the end that it’s absolutely an essential experience for anyone who’s ever loved games from the 1970s, 80s and 90s. What’s more, it provides exactly what I’m searching for in this retro throwback series – a true conversation with the games of the past that recontextualizes them for today and also builds upon them in a meaningful way.
That’s a lot to load into the first paragraph of this look at Horace, so let’s begin, as the game does, with its simple premise and expand out from there. The first hour of Horace involves a yellow robot that resembles a corpulent LEGO minifigure narrating his life story from his earliest days living with an English family in a mansion to the game’s present day dystopia which follows a war between humans and robots that happened while Horace was shut down. For many players, I expect this first hour is a make or break moment because it involves a lot of exposition (narrated retrospectively by Horace using a synthetic voice) and some very easy platforming as Horace learns how to navigate his world. While the story is well-told and the cast of characters who are introduced are interesting and memorable, the sinking feeling that this long-winded storytelling and simple platforming is all the game is going to offer sets in rapidly.
But those who can stick with the game past this introduction will realize that it’s not only necessary for the game to pull off what it’s ultimately going to try to do but also a very interesting reflection on the evolution of platform gaming. Horace’s initial trials simply involve running, jumping and dodging hazards Mario-style, but as he gains more confidence and abilities, the game adds in more complex actions, like picking up trash scattered around the stage, catching and shooting basketballs or playing a game called Table Tennis for 2 with his creator and father figure, affectionately known throughout the game as “The Old Man.” That last action, incidentally, begins another evolution: Horace loves video games, and as the game progresses, he’s exposed to a growing array of fictional arcade games he can play and experiences he can have that are reminiscent of other popular games ranging from Space Invaders to Pac-Man to After Burner to Chase H.Q. to Wolfenstein 3D to Guitar Hero, just to name a few.
When the prologue ends and the game begins to expand into more of a Metroid-style platform adventure, Horace still keeps things reined in for another couple of hours as the robot explores the ruins of the Mansion he’s always known as his home and finds some survivors who won’t quite tell him what happened, but who do give him hope that all of the people he loved from the Old Man’s estate are still alive and well. He acquires a special pair of boots that allow him to walk on most walls and ceilings and learns how to traverse the very dangerous, hazard-filled world around him. Throughout much of the game, the world literally revolves around him.
Horace has always been dressed in a suit and tie, but he also begins wearing the Old Man’s bowler hat, and these details allow for some fun visual cues. For starters, he looks a bit like Sonic the Hedgehog in color – he even lets his arms swing behind him as he runs - but his rounded contours and jumping style are far more reminiscent of Mario, albeit dressed as a British gentleman instead of someone in the working class. When Horace is upside down, his tie falls out of his suit and points in the direction of gravity, but once he’s back on the ground and pauses for a moment, an animation will make him quickly replace the tie in his jacket. And in scenes where Horace is forced to blend in with other robots by stripping off his clothes, his big, expressive eyes and pixelated smile remind us that he’s still the hero – the other robots all have a blank, dead-eyed stare.
Horace’s adventures take him across a world made up of four regions connected by a train, and in each region, there are places for him to work, shop and do activities in between the sections required to progress. One of Horace’s life goals is to clean up the world by clearing a million pieces of trash, and this serves not only as a collectathon goal, but also a means of gaining currency since much of that trash can be sold at the scrapyard for funds that can be used to enhance Horace’s trash-clearing abilities, afford him a few useful (but not mandatory) upgrades or purchase train tickets. Horace’s other major goal is to find all of the people he knew in his old life, particularly his adopted sister Heather. In the midst of his adventures, Horace dreams of a Heavenly realm where he is soaring through the clouds in a pseudo-3D minigame where he attempts to fly through rings as he chases a vision of the Old Man, and the notion of whether or not Horace is actually alive and has a soul is a major theme of the game, particularly since the story is told from Horace’s often naïve point of view.
As Horace progresses, the game becomes very inventive and interesting, and every time you think you know what it’s going to do next, it throws something new at you. One good example occurs in the ruins of the Mansion, where Horace uncovers a cluster of nanobots and triggers a surprise boss battle. The game’s mechanics shift into a fusion of platforming and bullet hell avoidance of projectiles, forcing the player to stomp on lasers at the right time and later leap on the boss at the right time and attack its weak spot. It’s the first truly big moment in the game, and also the first major difficulty spike. Fortunately, one conceit of the game is that Horace has unlimited lives (something the Old Man explains to him early on in the story), allowing this battle to be resolved quickly through trial and error. But it also sets the tone for what’s to come – Horace becomes extremely challenging past this point and you will die a lot trying to get through some of the tougher platforming sequences. While the game does eventually offer frequent checkpoints and a comfort system that somewhat scales the difficulty by giving Horace shields that can absorb hazards and make him temporarily invincible, there are still moments where it’s tough to hit the right timing and an obstacle just before the next checkpoint can become maddening to overcome.
Fortunately, the game has a nice sense of pacing and will follow these tough sections up with interesting shifts in mechanics or with cutscenes that allow for a brief respite before moving on to the next challenge. One of the standout moments in the game occurs midway through when Horace enters the home of his old friend Alice and finds himself in a strange sort of Wonderland where he not only has to manipulate clockwork rotating puzzles, play a game of human chess and avoid the pursuing head of a giant Cheshire cat, but also battle the Red Queen via a series of ZX Spectrum-inspired minigames (even providing some clever allusions to the Speccy’s classic Horace trilogy!) as she shakes the monitor to try to thwart his progression. It turns out this is all a sort of digital trip Horace is experiencing while another character is examining his circuits, but it provides a clever exploration of Horace’s psyche that still feels meaningful within the broader story.
There’s another sequence that takes place in a television studio where each room has Horace climbing through the catwalks and rigging above different shows that are being filmed. One of these rooms has John Phillip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” – the theme song to Monty Python’s Flying Circus – playing in the background, and if Horace falls down onto the stage, it triggers an amusing death scene that evokes the animation style of Terry Gilliam. It’s a wonderful little gag in what’s a rather tense platforming section, and it (and other sequences like it) evoke the death scenes of old adventure games where going the wrong way gets you killed because the developers wanted to keep you moving forward.
And there are so many other moments in Horace that deserve discussion but which only really seem to be chronicled on TV Tropes. For example, there are many cameos and references to popular culture that are thrown in for fun but which have no bearing on the story and aren’t called out in any obvious way. There’s a city called “Sitcombe” that’s populated by caricatures of famous TV personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David and the cast of Friends as well as a Monty Python-style Gumby shopkeeper. Many characters have punny plays on celebrity names, like Dr. Wilf Herral (Will Ferrell), Barry Stilton (Paris Hilton) and Bitchy Million (Billy Mitchell), and two of them, Mr. Preston and Mr. Logan, are rock and rollers who have an “excellent adventure” traveling through time along with Horace. An anthropomorphic Thomas the Tank Engine takes your tickets in the train stations. In the arcades, you can often spot cameos from famous characters like Ryu and Ken slouched over arcade cabinets. A scene showing the destruction of the world’s A-list celebrities shows a clear caricature of Tom Cruise triumphantly accepting two awards in an underground bunker before a Death Star-like one in a million shot travels down a small shaft and kills everyone in the room. And if that’s not enough Star Wars for you, there’s a wonderfully humorous scene where Horace attempts to enter a bar and is thrown out because the bartender is not interested in serving his kind.
Mechanically, the game is also amazing. There are devious platform puzzles that involve orienting the screen the right way to fall past hazards. There are stealth puzzles that involve tossing objects onto moving platforms to get them through restricted areas while you take an alternate path to catch up with them on the other side. There’s a sequence where Horace gains the ability to dash through crumbling walls but then is also immediately saddled with carrying a delicate piece of machinery through a burning building while a 10-minute timer counts down. There’s a part where Horace has to ride a roller coaster car along a series of broken tracks during his escape from a carnival after winning first prize in a fun fair. There’s a section where Horace has to save a space shuttle from catching on fire mid-flight and then, after the game’s true villain is revealed, where he has to escape from the Moon in a shoot ‘em up sequence. And this is on top of an incredible number of mechanically varied sequences that can be frustrating due to their difficulty, but which are never boring.
Music also plays an important role in Horace, and the soundtrack is filled with classical musical arrangements and original compositions by the game’s creator, Paul Helman. While many gamers may not know pieces like Franz Peter Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony No. 8”, Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre” or “Aquarium,” the Dies Irae from Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” or selections from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” by name, I can promise that these pieces will be familiar and sound wonderful under Helman’s chiptune arrangements. There are also a number of original pieces that either evoke popular songs, which are reminiscent of older video game music or which serve as the backbone for Horace’s many rhythm games, some of which are tied to jobs Horace can do for extra money and others of which are part of the storyline or included in the “Rhythm King” arcade game.
And then there are the boss battles, which are all suitably epic and which provide some additional standout moments for the game. Each encounter is built around a set of mechanics that allow Horace to use moment and actions in some way, but some of them are quite unexpected. For example, the game pits Horace against four elemental-themed robot masters midway through. One battle takes place atop a giant egg-shaped robot where Horace has to dodge its giant arms and projectiles while tricking it into hitting its own weak spot, while another involves a Breakout-like confrontation with a rampaging rock robot and another involves fighting a rotating sphere made out of craft materials that fires rockets and buzzsaws at Horace and, for because the battle occurs in a library, also books. A fourth battle involves racing a swimming robot until the water can drain out of the area, leaving her flailing and defeated. All of these battles occur within the same section of the game and yet are each so different from one another that none of the same tricks and tactics will work to get past them – each must be dealt with on its own terms.
And in the end, that’s what Horace really presents to the player – a massive, impressive and highly sophisticated experience that’s steeped in a deep love for video games, popular culture, literature, art, music and British culture. It’s not a pretentious game by any means – one of the characters has an affinity for “pull my finger” jokes and there’s a running gag about magic mushrooms that goes far further than you’d ever assume it would – but it is a deep one, with characters that have motivations informing their actions, a philosophical storyline about what it means for created beings to either serve or turn on their unjust creators and the power that a childhood experience can have in shaping the destinies of thinking beings as they grow. The game’s comedic tone and pixel graphics keep it from being pretentious, but it still has many serious ideas to explore and points to make. The ending is also deeply emotional because the game has taken such great pains to make you care about the fates of everyone involved, including the villains.
Let’s return to my earlier point about Horace being not just a game, but a true conversation with the medium that builds upon and recontextualizes the games of the past. While someone could play Horace and enjoy it on its own terms, it’s pretty hard to play it without noticing some of the distinct choices Paul Helman made to evoke the experience of playing older games alongside the consumption of other media, art and culture. Horace is as much a love letter and defense of video games as a medium as it is an attempt to prove that video games deserve to be considered as serious artistic efforts.
One easy example is during the Wonderland sequence when Horace finds himself in a dead ringer for Sonic’s Green Hills Zone. In the Sonic games, the robots are the enemies and Sonic can break them open to set the woodland creatures inside free. But in Horace’s psyche, the world is twisted and closing in on itself, eventually impossible to explore due to the grinning cat head that’s chasing behind. Horace can initially find some Sonic-like powerups to get him through, but he eventually faces the same problems Sonic does where he has to run fast and avoid hazards that are only a short distance ahead. Stopping for even a second kills his progression – and the fun – of the experience.
But it goes deeper. This section is also infested with mushrooms, one of the mainstays of that other major gaming mascot’s adventures as well as a key component of the story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is both being alluded to in this sequence and also is a probable inspiration for the Mushroom Kingdom and growth mechanics in Super Mario Bros.. The mushrooms are actually quite annoying because they slow Horace down and force him to behave in a more Mario-like way as he bounces off them than a speedy Sonic-like way where he’d just run and jump over them. When you consider, as I pointed out earlier, that Horace himself has characteristics of both of these classic platforming characters, it’s surprising to see how deeply Paul Helman was able to connect these dots throughout the gameplay to not just reference, but actively utilize, the ideas of two of the most familiar platformers out there. And yet he’s also showing that these very ideas touch upon the same well of inspiration that powers literature and imaginative fantasy stories. That Horace himself is a video gamer who is probably channeling these characters in his own dream world adds an additional layer of subtext that’s really interesting.
And lest you think I’m making too much of things, a major plot point in the game involves a revelation that Horace had a predecessor who, like himself, was raised as part of the Old Man’s family and taught to play video games. But unlike Horace, this character figured out how to control the nanomachines in the Old Man’s lab with a game controller and use them to animate otherwise lifeless objects. When you battle this character, he literally fights using a large device that evokes the NES Controller, and a further battle with him occurs inside an actual game world created by plugging a USB cable into his brain. The connection this character and Horace have is very deep given that they have the same basic life experiences, and the conclusion is that one was abandoned and forgotten because he was too powerful to be loved while the other, weaker creation was nurtured and cherished until the trauma of the Old Man’s heart attack cut him off from the family and forced him to find his own purpose in life.
That might feel like the logical ending of Horace, but there’s still quite a bit to go after that sequence. Later on in the game, Horace participates in an actual video game tournament. The boss is a mustachioed replica of the original fiberglass Computer Space coin-op cabinet, and he forces Horace to defeat it in a game similar to Pong. This is not only a nice callback to the beginning of Horace’s adventure, where he plays a Tennis game with the old man (hearkening back to William Higginbotham’s Computer Tennis and the more familiar Ralph Baer Table Tennis version included in the Magnavox Odyssey), but also an interesting challenge given that the actual Atari Pong game that debuted a year after Computer Space looked far more like the conventional arcade cabinets seen throughout Horace’s adventures. In isolation, it would probably make a lot more sense for Horace and this boss to play a round of Spacewar!, but given that this Computer Space cabinet is attempting to find a worthy successor to himself, it makes perfect sense that select the game that not only came after him, but popularized arcade video gaming.
(I also find it amusing that the epic Pong game takes place on a chessboard – the civilized and highly competitive tactical board game that video games largely supplanted and which AI came to dominate - and that the arcade machine shouts synthesized insults and excuses at you as you play.)
These sorts of moments (and so many more like them) point to the game’s examination of where the medium gaming has been, but there’s also a bit of introspection on what it means today and even where it’s going. One of the fundamental ideas of Horace is that the hero is able to overcome challenges because he sees tasks as being like objectives in a video game. Since Horace is relating his story to us in what we can presume is a posthumous narration (since we see his final days and afterlife in the final sequence), it’s probable he’s an unreliable narrator and the experiences he’s relating have been video-gamified because that’s the chosen filter of his retrospective. Horace also sees himself as a video game protagonist and the other characters as NPCs under the control of AI, which is why he has infinite lives and special abilities while others do not and also why it’s up to him to clean up the game world instead of recruiting others to help him with his quest.
In a time in which gamification is a real thing and where a generation that experienced the unique art form of video gaming has come of age and is now moving into positions of influence and power, Horace speaks to the feeling of connecting this past and present together and integrating them into the broader world. If Horace was only referencing video game-related art and music, that would be as far as it goes, but the game takes great pains to include recognizable classical art, poetry and music along with its callbacks to popular, contemporary things like Star Wars, Mission Impossible, Dr. Who and the Wu-Tang Clan, among many other references. There’s a desire here to contextualize video games as being on equal footing with these other media and art forms and also to find connections between the influences all of them have had on the game’s creator and audience. It’s weird to think that a game that has stand-ins for George Costanza and Kramer running around in one of its cities is also filled with Beethoven music, classical sculptures, Renaissance paintings and quotes from history and literature. It might seem overstuffed and even ill-advised for a game to do that, but it’s all there and, more importantly, it all really works together.
As for the future of gaming, an intriguing aspect of the game is in how the robots, trained to serve humans and behave like them, develop a strong affection for video games and even swear fealty to the greatest gamer in the world. This might seem trivial at first, but we already in an era where AI programs can be trained to play games as well as humans or even better, and the early stages of AI were largely driven by teaching computer systems to understand rules and attempt to beat human opponents through algorithmic approaches. For a long time, this was (and still largely is) how AI opponents in video games functioned. As neural networks have become a more popular approach for AI, machine learning has become possible through repeated exposures to games and it’s now possible to train a general-purpose computer program to play a game over and over until it’s able to succeed at it.
We’re not at a point of AGI (advanced general intelligence) as of this writing, but it’s not hard to foresee a day when robotic companions, whether actual physical automatons or simply internet-encoded virtual assistants, are a part of our everyday lives and we are asking them to play games with us in addition to the other tasks they’re capable of performing. Imagine being able to have a robotic friend who can learn to play Street Fighter II with you and even provide you with useful pointers and training mid-game to help you get better at playing, the same way a human friend might. Imagine being able to play a splitscreen couch game like Mario Kart 8 with a robotic companion sitting right next to you. The scenes in Horace where a smiling, well-dressed robot plays games with his family using a game controller and responding to what’s happening onscreen might have seemed far off to gamers during the disappointing days of R.O.B. and the NES, but today, they’re not just possible, but probable within our lifetime.
And that leads me to one final thought about Horace: it’s ultimately a game about family, and that idea goes far deeper than just the simple notion of Horace being adopted by the Old Man. While Horace’s adventures are definitely strongly related to reconnecting with the people dear to him and even finding them in the great beyond, there are also many other fascinating connections in the game that are worth mentioning. One involves a child who died at some point in the past and leaves such a gaping hole in the hearts of his parents that they obsess over collecting the object that killed him. Another involves two brothers – or is it, as the game subtly suggests, actually three? – who have a profound experience during childhood that puts them on a trajectory to become the people who shape the world in both good ways and bad ones. Then there’s the pairing of Barry and Edwina Stilton, which Horace sees from the moment it begins and which results in Edwina being obviously pregnant throughout the main story and giving Barry Stilton (who’s definitely no hero) two good reasons to be in the fight and to become one of Horace’s most trusted allies despite his less admirable traits and early contempt for robots.
But the most important connection in the game is between Creator, Player and the unfolding experience of the game itself, which are embodied in the story by the Old Man (who’s standing in for Paul Helman), Horace (in the role of the player) and Heather, Horace’s adopted sister who first rejects him, then becomes his friend, his post-war goal, his ally and, after a tragic turn of events, his guiding spirit once he’s proved he’s capable of surviving on his own. The relationship between these characters is itself worthy of another piece, but suffice it to say that I found myself surprisingly moved by everything that happened between them and also impressed by how the actions of the Old Man not only led to Horace’s awakening as an avatar for the player, but as a soulful, introspective being that follows in his footsteps even as he discovers his creator’s dark past during the journey. Heather’s arc as a character also follows the feel of the game – first uncomfortable and unfamiliar, then rewarding once Horace has mastered the basics, then focused on progression and defeating the robot antagonists, and finally sent off to wait in a wonderful ending that any gamer should want to eventually experience, but which also feels worth putting off so the game can be fully enjoyed before it has to end.
When Horace debuted in 2019, some reviewers and players compared Horace to the Isaac Asimov novella The Bicentennial Man and the updated 1992 novel The Positronic Man (which both serve as the source material of the largely negatively received 1999 film Bicentennial Man), and the connections are definitely there. But whereas the Asimov story was about a robot who is too special to be a menial being and who, after a remarkable life, eventually has to give up his immortality to become regarded as human in a Pinocchio-like fashion, I feel Horace has something very different to say.
In Horace, the robot is not trying to live forever or to even be a human; he’s instead searching for a way for robots and humans to live in harmony and wants nothing more than to recapture the joy of his younger years in an afterlife spent with his family where that division between biological and synthetic life no longer matters. He doesn’t mind completing menial tasks and will spend an entire game cleaning up a million pieces of trash if it makes the world a better place. He deeply cares for all of the decent people and robots he encounters and will do what he can do avert their destruction if they’ll allow it. As much as he comes to resemble the Old Man, he’s unquestionably better than him, and his own demise is not due to a sudden and traumatic act of nature, but the consequences of his heroism causing him to fade away gradually and gracefully knowing that he’s made the world a better place by existing in it.
Players who see this magnificent game through can help Horace to accomplish that goal, and in doing so, they’ll experience one of the finest retro-throwback games I’ve ever encountered. I’m hopeful that it will one day find the massive audience it deserves and be regarded as the modern classic that it is. But until then, all I can do is urge people to play it and see for themselves what they’ve been missing.
Meanwhile, In Our Main Series…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!