Headlander is a game developed by Double Fine and Adult Swim. It has been sitting on my Steam list for a long time and probably would have continued to sit there if I had not gotten the Steamdeck to motivate me to play games like it while traveling or sitting in waiting rooms. It’s a game that originally sold me on its style in its trailers and seemed like an interesting puzzle-adventure game, but it’s just taken me a long while to finally play it. Having completed it in about seven hours, I come away with mixed feelings.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

6.6 hours
Story completed
Played entirely on Steamdeck

Pros

Clever puzzles
Dynamic boss fights
Some interesting pieces of the story

Cons

Combat gets a little dull by the end
Navigating the large maps gets tiring and is clunky
Story is a little too ambitious for the writing

The Rest of It

Story

The game begins with the camera zoomed in on the protagonist’s head. Very quickly, it’s established that’s all there is to the protagonist. It’s just a head inside a space-helmet with a propulsion system capable of lifting and flying the head all over a room. A mysterious voice mentions that something has gone wrong, and that the AI known as Methuselah is looking for this head, for reasons unknown. As just a head, the hero doesn’t have a method of speaking without any lungs or vocal cords. In addition, they have a classic case of amnesia, so they’re just dubbed as the headlander until their real identity is found.

The voice guides the hero through the tutorial process as robot attackers sent by the evil AI emerge and attempt to destroy the headlander. Shortly thereafter, it’s revealed that humanity achieved the ability to transfer a person’s consciousness into machines. As a result, there are no living human beings left in this sector of the galaxy. The consciousness of every person is now contained in the bodies of individual robots and backed up to a cloud-like storage, just in case anything happens to the robot body.

A significant portion of the first half of the game is dedicated to simply uncovering the map and more of the lore of Headlander, such as what happened to the humans, the intent of the malicious AI, and who the headlander is. At some point, a resistance group is revealed along with what the headlander’s role is in all of it. While I think there are some interesting concepts at play here, I don’t think Headlander really sticks the landing when it comes to a story. A lot of questions are raised, especially in the final act, and not all of them are answered. It almost comes across as though the developers were just trying to make things more complicated to make the player more invested in the story at the last minute, rather than really telling a cohesive plot from beginning to end. The nature of consciousness and how humanity has evolved/regressed as a result of their decision to eliminate organic bodies are interesting subjects to tackle, which Headlander attempts to do to some degree. However, it has a lot of the signature Double-Fine and Adult Swim tone and writing to balance out the deep ideas with humor. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the humor got in the way. Overall, the story is okay, but it’s not the main reason I was compelled to play the game.

Gameplay

Headlander is a two-dimensional, platforming, puzzle-adventure game in which you traverse a large map and gain access to new abilities that unlock additional pathways for you to explore. In other words, it’s a Metroid type of game. There are a few key differences between the gameplay styles, but the overall architecture is there. As a little floating head, you cannot do much at first, including open doors. In order to move from one room to another, you have to use your helmet’s vacuum power to suck the heads off of robots and take over their bodies like a mind-controlling parasite. Most robots that you encounter come equipped with a weapon, and a level of security that determines which doors will open for you. The security level is color-coded and prominently displayed in the lower right of the screen to let you know which doors will open for you at all times. It’s a very simple method of gating progress through the game, because you won’t be able to move beyond specific sections of the map until enemies of the new color are introduced.

The weapons themselves are arm cannons that you can aim in 360 degrees with the right control stick. To assist with the aim, you can hold down a trigger button on the controller (or Steam deck in my case), and a laser sight shows the path your shots will take. Depending on the security level of the body you’re controlling, and how much power your head has, your shots can ricochet off multiple surfaces, allowing you to perform some impressive trick shots. Sometimes, hitting multiple surfaces with a single shot is part of a puzzle as well. If you fire too many shots in quick succession, you risk overheating your gun and can be put in a hairy situation if there are numerous enemies firing at you. Health points do not come easy in combat, even if you’ve leveled up multiple times. It doesn’t take long for the robot bodies to take too many gunshots and start to explode. Likewise, it only takes a few direct hits to your head when it is not attached to a body for it to be destroyed. Your head’s health does replenish if it goes a few seconds without being damaged, thankfully, so you’ll just have to survive a few bullet-hell scenarios if you aren’t able to secure another body to tank the hits.

As you progress through the large map and open up new doors and secrets, you’ll come across various skill points, as well as upgrade rooms. The upgrade rooms give your head more health, more power, or new abilities. The skill points are scattered all over the place, as well as awarded when certain quests are completed. You can use the skill points to level up certain abilities as well as get new ones. For example, you can upgrade yourself to the point that when you leave a robot body, it continues to fire its gun like a turret. You can also get abilities that help you escape trouble quickly, like the power to knock another robot’s head off with a melee attack that immediately places your head on the new body, basically giving you a full health bar in the process. By the end of the game, I had maxed out the character sheet and upgraded every ability, but I still could die just as quickly as ever if I was careless. So, Headlander is pretty balanced in terms of its difficulty from beginning to end.

Having finished the game in just under seven hours, Headlander is relatively short, but I think it’s probably the right length for the amount of complexity in the gameplay and its story. By the time the credits rolled, I was ready to call it a day. I left some quests unfinished because I couldn’t really be bothered to 100% Headlander for a few reasons. The main reason was that the process of navigating the big map was getting tedious due to the fact that you had access to a limited number of teleport rooms. In addition, even though you can fly your head around, you are reliant on slow-moving elevators to get anywhere, because the bodies you inhabit are not able to traverse upward on their own, and you need a body to open the doors.

The other reason I left the game “incomplete” was because the combat was no longer interesting. Dodging shots as the head is fun enough as a bullet-hell experience, and the basic firing mechanics were able to entertain me through the first half. But by the end, I was often doing my best to just get through rooms before enemies spawned and shots were fired. There would often be long hallways or big rooms where I was expected to out-shoot other robots and blast their heads off. Instead, I just combat rolled over and over until I got to the next door, occasionally swapping bodies when necessary. The shooting was fine, but it wasn’t as engaging as Metroid or Castlevania because of the overheating mechanic. The combat is more complex than those old games, because you have more various tools in your kit, and you have more mobility with how the head can fly around. However, it’s not complex enough that the available tools made things as interesting or fast as something modern like Dead Cells or Shovel Knight. I mostly just wanted to either shoot or run, and not get very fancy with the gun fights. The exceptions as to where the combat got interesting, however, were in the boss battles. They were few, but they managed to inject some engaging scenarios into the gameplay and spice things up.

Presentation

Headlander has a certain aesthetic it is going for, and it mostly works. The menus all take the style of that 1970’s palette with a lot of oranges, yellows, and browns. Meanwhile, the rest of the game has a standard sci-fi look with more primary colors. I would have preferred the game was more consistent and stuck to the 70’s colors more, but what remained wasn’t bad either. There are plenty of rooms in Headlander that have a nice appearance to them with a lot of vibrant color and personality. Keep in mind, however I couldn’t see too much detail on my Steamdeck screen most of the time, unless it was during a cut-scene. As for the animations and textures, they’re what you would expect of a game that came out when Headlander did. It’s perfectly serviceable, but nothing mind-blowing.

Likewise, the music was perfectly fine. There was a sci-fi style to the music with some synthesizers and what sounded like the occasional Theremin in the background. I don’t remember any particular songs that stood out, but the music never sounded bad to me.

TL;DR

Headlander is a reasonably charming game that manages to end just before it overstays its welcome. There are some intriguing ideas and questions its story raises, and the occasional joke made me chuckle, but nothing significant happened to make me think it was extremely interesting. The combat and puzzles are engaging for a while, but eventually, everything starts to get stale by the end, even with all the abilities and upgrades you unlock. Headlander doesn’t do enough to make it really stand out above other games that fit into the same genre, but it also doesn’t do enough wrong to not be worthy of a recommendation, especially if you are looking for a small game to kill some time.

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