Hymer 2000 Review

As much as I love grand narrative adventures, something that will always pique my interest is when a game attempts to do storytelling differently. There’s so much depth that can be found from shattering more conventional aspects of linear storytelling and using those pieces to create something new. On the most superficial of levels, Hymer 2000 is a game about recycling: you take on the role of Frank, a recycling specialist, whose task is to recycle the Hymer 2000 artificial intelligence unit that once oversaw operations at the Hope Residence care centre before it was shut down. However, upon discovering that the unit’s memory is corrupted and needs to be restored first, you’re quickly pulled into a nonlinear exploration of the things that once were.

Unlike games where players directly control an avatar, Hymer 2000 takes place entirely through the computer’s interface, which has a simple, pixelated aesthetic with a limited colour palette. The aesthetic evokes the late 80s and early 90s, a time when technology was a hell of a lot simpler than it is today, which stands in contrast against some of the incredible science fiction advancements that are central to the story. While this might seem like just an aesthetic choice or a way to set the game’s era, this contrast between technological immaturity and advancement quietly mirrors the social contrasts around which the narrative is built. The story that you uncover follows the lives of ‘donors’, the people who once lived at Hope Residence, who you soon learn were harshly relegated to second place against those who society deemed superior, and the game raises ever-pertinent questions around how modern civilisation can be so advanced in some ways and so horrifically regressive in others.

The narrative plays out interactively, using an old-school computer interface

Your work to recycle Hymer mainly takes place via the computer’s Action program, which allows you to control a humanoid avatar through an abstracted map of Hope Residence, although over the course of the game, Hymer shares other apps with you, and you can swap between them at will. While some of the apps are necessary to progress through the game, others are simply there for quiet moments of recreation if you happen to find them enjoyable, with otherwise neither incentive nor penalty for their use. In contrast to what is ultimately an extremely disturbing story, there’s something quite gentle about the way it all plays out; Hymer is in the very last moments of whatever passes for an AI’s life, and yet there’s an almost human contemplativeness in how it spends its final hours sharing its creations with you.

Another key program is Search, which is used to restore Hymer’s memory, and which over time will allow you to access locked regions of the Action map and progress through the game. This app uses straightforward keyword matching to find Hymer’s old chat logs, and by working your way through these, you slowly uncover fragments of the history of this place. The non-chronological exploration here lends players meaningful agency in putting the story back together; it’s immersive in a rare way, allowing you to freely pull at the threads and clues that intrigue you, and follow them as far as your curiosity leads.

To prevent cheesing, Search limits you to a maximum of four hits per keyword, which makes sense for the game’s pacing, even if it causes some frustration toward the end. Once you’re in the last 15% or so of the chat logs, it becomes surprisingly difficult to guess the words that are unique enough to return the remaining records. You don’t need 100% to finish the game, thankfully, but the experience would be improved by making the last set of logs a little easier to find (such as with a hint functionality), even if this was only accessible after game completion. It’s also worth mentioning that with Search’s heavy use of the keyboard, the UX is a little ungainly on the Switch, as you’re likely to end up jumping between the touchscreen and buttons a lot. The game is a little buggy as well, with issues like app windows occasionally closing or activating when you haven’t clicked on them, and there’s an app that gets added in the post-game which I simply couldn’t get to work at all.

Use Search to uncover a fragmented narrative

In addition to Hymer’s chat logs that you access via Search, other story snippets are revealed as you advance through the Action map and interact with objects you find scattered throughout. These fragments are more chronological, following a set of characters during their time at Hope Residence, in contrast to the chat logs that can be uncovered in any order depending on what you search. The nonlinear and linear aspects of the storytelling generally harmonise well, although since the object interactions are technically skippable, it’s not without pitfalls; much of the story is told through the object interaction mechanism, and overlooking just one or two (or a whole set in a branched off area, like I accidentally did) can lead to a few missed details that can make it hard to fully reconstruct the narrative without retracing your steps.

Each interaction with an object also unlocks artwork of that object which gets saved to Hymer’s Faces program. They’re faces only insofar as we allow ourselves to see faces within them, as the objects – shopping bags, scissors, lampposts, and so on – are entirely inanimate, but they are nevertheless the only faces that you encounter in the game’s entirety. This foray into the uncanny valley is unsettling, but it is also somewhat brilliant in the way it echoes the game’s central questions around what exactly we recognise as human. Nothing here is alive except for you, technically, but, kept company by both Hymer and its memories of the people who once were, it’s hard to feel truly alone. Equally, the characters in the narrative lived their humanity in every act, but society refused to see them as human, and the projection of human faces onto inanimate objects above these real flesh and blood people coldly underscores the cruelty of the world in which they existed.

Some faces are vague, while others are more unsettlingly humanoid

Pareidolia, the phenomenon of projecting an interpretation (such as a face) onto an indeterminate stimulus, ends up taking on a metaphorical slant here too, raising questions about whether we’re just seeking a deeper meaning in something – in the game, in life, in the universe – whose conclusion is always predetermined and inevitable. Hymer 2000 doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, instead leaving it up to you to decide for yourself. It’s apt, then, that living with uncertainty and making meaning for yourself is so poignantly human, and the game does an excellent job of prompting you to consider the bigger picture without offering trite consolations about one’s importance in a grander scheme.

If, once you start playing, the narrative ends up feeling familiar, it’s certainly not an accident; Hymer 2000 is heavily inspired by a famous Kazuo Ishiguro novel and film adaptation, which, to avoid spoilers, I won’t mention for those who would recognise it by name. The game’s overlaps with the inspiration material are significant enough that some of the plot reveals do lose some of their impact if you happen to recognise the setting, but the game is nevertheless not derivative, borrowing the concept but offering its own characters, settings, and perspectives to allow it to stand on its own two feet and expand upon the original themes. There is also a particular beauty in turning this story into an interactive one and giving the audience some agency in it, and it lends itself well to this format, even if your agency is caught up with the story’s trajectory toward the inevitable.

Final Thoughts

Hymer 2000 is many things – painful, poignant, philosophical – and it asks you to consider questions that are much bigger than you’d think would fit comfortably into a short afternoon’s gameplay. Its heartwrenching story will haunt you, but there’s something beautiful in that.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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