Headlander, the latest game from developer Double Fine, is a beautifully strange thing. Looking like it was ripped off the side of an airbrushed van or found on the cover of a funk record, and playing like a 2D Metroidvania game, there’s a lot to love. Unfortunately, some strange gameplay decisions do make the ride a little less smooth than one would hope.
In Headlander, you play as the last remaining flesh-and-blood human, or at least what’s left. Looking straight out of Futurama, you are only a head stuck in a helmet. Thankfully, this helmet has all sorts of abilities, including jets to fly around, a suction vacuum and more.
Humanity has developed a way to upload human consciousness into robot bodies, but these robots have been controlled by an evil AI. This means it is up to you to go fight back to help regain control of humanity (kinda).
Gameplay largely revolves around you flying your helmet-head-person around until you find a robot. Once near one, you can use the suction abilities of the helmet to rip the head off the robot, and dock your helmet on. This allows you to take control of the robot’s body, and do whatever the robot can do.
Playing out like a Metroidvania game, Headlander sees you move through a maze of a 2D environment. Each room is full of fun little surprises and secrets like upgrades to your helmet’s heath and power, or little snippets of dialogue and story. Because this is a Double Fine game, you can expect the NPCs to rattle off bizarre and funny lines if you take the time to talk to them.
The world features a security system based on colors of the rainbow. Any robot can go through a gray door, but only red robots, or red robot bodies you have landed on and now control, can go through red doors. Moving up the ROYGBV scale, orange bots are slightly stronger, and can go through both red and orange doors. This escalates up to violet robots, who are the strongest and can go through any door in the game.
There are also secret passages that you can only access if you are just flying around as a head or if you’ve docked onto a special short robot body. These paths typically lead to short hallways with upgrades at the end, but can sometimes open up shortcuts between two areas or other important passages.
Combat is done by flying around and taking over different robot bodies. After landing on a colored robot, you get access to that robot’s laser gun. You can shoot off enemy heads to make jumping into other bodies easier, or you can simply shoot them until they blow up completely. There’s also a melee attack and a roll move with each type of bot you come to control.
This can lead to some hilarious situations, where you find yourself on a robot body that’s about to explode in the middle of a firefight. Do you run over to another robot to get them caught in the explosion, or do you make a clean getaway and suck off another robot’s head to continue the fight in your new body?
It’s really great seeing Headlander incorporate its sense of style so heavily into everything from graphics and sound to gameplay design, with a spectrum of colors representing different security levels. While the animations may not be crisp, this style helps make Headlander visually captivating. I didn’t really want to look away from the screen, everything seemed to just feel right at home together.
Like other Metroidvania games, players can expect puzzles, backtracking to unlock upgrades with new weapons and abilities, and even some boss fights. Unfortunately, the boss fights are where Headlander stumbles the hardest.
While the fights themselves are pretty fun, the big issue is the checkpoint system the game uses. If you die, you get reset to the last door you walked into. Normally, this works great, seeing as how a fast respawn time with few consequences of setback allows you to play riskier. In boss fights, however, it means you have to restart the entire fight. Seeing as how each fight has multiple stages, you can find yourself having to slog through the opening stages again and again, only to die on a harder stage. Thankfully, this issue really only happens twice throughout Headlander, and isn’t all that big a setback.
The story is strange, and definitely felt like an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey and other classic sci-fi stories. However, as previously mentioned, this is a Double Fine game after all. You can expect some laughs and lightheartedness along the way as well.
Overall, Headlander is the most fun I’ve had with a Double Fine game since the first time I played through Psychonauts. With gameplay revolving around an elegant, but surprisingly involved head landing mechanic, and audio and visual flair in spades, this is definitely something any video game fan should check out.
Headlander is available for PS4 and PC on July 26.
So what do you think? Are you interested in giving Headlander a try? What other games from Double Fine have you enjoyed? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
