To start with Henry Hatsworth is a breath of fresh air: a new platforming game with a great new character from EA, a publisher that was once famous for its release-every-year strategy. But, sadly, it turns stale after a while and becomes downright stenchy near the end of the game as the cheapness of the level design is bound to cause all but the most hardened gamer to throw down their DS in disgust.

Henry Hatsworth is the Pompous Adventurers Club’s number 1 adventurer. He’s as stereotypically 19th century British as anyone could be, complete with bowler hat, monocle and large mustache. The game begins with Hatsworth in the jungle trying to find the mysterious golden hat. His nemesis, the Pompous Adventurers Club’s number 2 adventurer, Weasleby, is also after it, but for far more nefarious reasons. It turns out the hat is a device that can straddle two worlds – our world and the Puzzle Realm, a place that looks like Tetris, or Bejewelled. This is really just an elaborate plot device to weave platforming and puzzling into one game.

What this genre-straddling means in practice is that you control Henry in the real world on the top screen, while on the bottom screen a bunch of blocks rise up slowly. As Hatsworth kills enemies on the top screen they fly into the Puzzle Realm and become blocks on the bottom screen. If you let these blocks rise back up into the top screen without destroying them then they will attack you again in the real world, so it’s important to watch the bottom screen and switch to it every now and then to dispatch pesky enemies forever. Fortunately time pauses when you switch to the puzzle screen, giving you time to slide blocks around (horizontally only) and make sets of three matching ones to clear them. You only have a limited amount of time in the puzzle screen before you are sent back to carry on in the real world, so you have to be quick if you want to make as many matches as possible. As you match blocks you fill up your super meter. If you fill your super meter once then Henry becomes younger and his health is somewhat replenished. If you fill your super meter a second time then Tea Time becomes available. Activating Tea Time transforms Hatsworth into a giant invincible robot for a time, and is invaluable in the later parts of the game.

The adventure consists of five worlds, each with a number of stages. The first few worlds are not particularly difficult at all, and you’ll likely get through them quite easily and enjoy them thoroughly. Unfortunately at one point in the third world there is a difficulty spike the likes of which makes Mount Everest look like a small dung-heap in your back garden. In world one and two there are a few boss fights which pose slightly more threat than normal enemies do, but are quite easily dispatched, but the boss in the third world is ludicrous. Before anyone suggests that I simply don’t cut it as a gamer, I’m not saying it’s hard, I’m saying it’s insane.

Treasure games are generally quite hard, Ikaruga, for example, but they never feel anywhere near as cheap as this boss. Megaman games are considered quite tough, but that series’ bosses are not nearly as annoying as this one. Hatsworth is not a particularly maneuverable character, so it often feels like you’re fighting the controls more than the boss itself. Very often the strategy is more to not get hit and wait for your puzzle meter to grow so that you can activate Tea Time, but this can take a painfully long time. Of course, there is satisfaction in beating the insanity and overcoming, but part of your sanity is lost in the process after realizing that you’re not dying because you’re not good enough, you’re dying because the game-makers are sadistic.

Unfortunately the third world boss is not an isolated incident – from then on the game gets more and more frustrating, and I began to be really annoyed with some design decisions. For starters the stages are very long. Later stages can take 15 minutes to complete and only have two checkpoints in them, making it extremely frustrating to lose all your lives and have to restart the level from scratch. The reason the levels are so long is an even more annoying design decision – every now and then you reach a spot where the screen no longer scrolls and you simply have to kill hundreds of minions before moving on.

These minions don’t die by hitting them once or twice – some of them you have to hit 10 times or more (a general complaint that applies everywhere in the game). In these fixed-screen battles there are often so many enemies on screen that you can’t stand anywhere without being hit – it feels like someone thought they would have some fun with the player by wasting their time fighting horribly repetitive battles with astronomical odds against them. Once again Tea Time is your rescue – and you better make sure that you arrive at these battles with enough super meter to be able to activate Tea Time. This means completing the area before the battle in perfect style because one or two hits means you lose your entire super meter (and get old, slowing down your firing speed).

There is so much promise in Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. The game system is great; the 2D platforming is very tight and some of the best outside of Nintendo games; the upgrade system is good; the character design (including the bosses) is fantastic; the story is fun; even the puzzle game is fairly entertaining and varied, although it could never stand on its own. Some of the platforming level-design is also really good, but for the most part there is a lot of repetition in ideas and far too much reliance on the fixed-area battles. The unnecessary difficulty and repetitiveness of the platforming lets the puzzle mechanic down by making you have to rely on it so much so that it becomes a chore. If EA could reduce the number of hits each enemy needed to kill them, increase the amount of actual platforming (as opposed to fighting), and most importantly keep the DS-threatening difficulty spikes in check they would have a really great new platforming series on their hands. As it is it doesn’t come close to the best the DS has to offer in the genre.

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