Where to start with a game like Horace? Maybe with how it’s one of the year’s finest games, and definitely its most overlooked. A sprawling, cinematic and ever-inventive 2D platformer – and puzzle game, and old-school arcade racer, and pixelart first-person shooter and about half a dozen other things it morphs into over its 20-hour running time – it’s a lyrical flight of fancy that could only ever, really, have been made in the industrial town of Sittingbourne, Kent (or Shittingbourne, as it’s affectionately known by locals).
HoraceDeveloper: Paul Helman/Sean ScaplehornPublisher: 505Availability: Out now on PC
Maybe it’s best to start with Paul Helman, the developer behind the art, design, music, gameplay, writing and promotion of a project that’s taken him some seven years to complete (with help from programmer Sean Scaplehorn). Horace is Helman, and Helman is Horace – a cauldron of pop-culture references and fondness for 16-bit classics, he’s both classy and chaotic. At last weekend’s EGX, his lanky frame hovered around the Horace stand dressed in an impeccable three-piece tweed suit and neatly polished tan brogues, all set off by a tatty Sainsbury’s bag he kept constantly by his side. Here, in both Horace and in Helman, is a proper English eccentric.
Work began on Horace some seven years ago, though Helman’s own story begins a little earlier than that; at the age of 17, he got his first job in the industry at Croydon-based Probe, working on some of its most high profile licensed games.
“When I went for my interview I was shown around the whole Probe office. I spent most of my time looking at Silicon Graphics machines and thinking this is the future,” says Helman. “I was shown both the Alien Trilogy room and the Die Hard Trilogy room. In the Alien Trilogy room, all the blinds were shut, most of the lights were turned off and it was full of very goth people. It was very, very Alien.
“I had long hair at the time, but I’ve always been more on the punk side of alternative music. So I remember thinking ‘Oh, this looks kind of cool I could fit in there,’ and then I went around the Die Hard room and it was the exact opposite. And I can remember like, getting really good vibes at the interview and thinking this is really good because they asked me back for like a trial day and that was like, I hope I get to work on Alien Trilogy. Then I turned up and they said you’re going to be working on Die Hard. I was like ‘oh’.”
Die Hard Trilogy ended up being not a bad project to cut your teeth on, though; a portmanteau piece formed of three very different games taking on the first three films. Its final section, which reimagined Die Hard with a Vengeance as a mad sprint around Manhattan, also beat Grand Theft Auto to the punch when it came to urban open worlds.