Slightly Obscure Games: Cyber Hook

you know i can't help but notice that many people bemoan the modern gaming industry filled with remakes and sequels and remasters and re-sequels to be completely honest with you i don't have a huge problem with this because there's still a lot of games that come out like every day it just so happens that a lot of the smaller titles fall through the cracks for a while now i've wanted to cover some of these games maybe make it a regular thing if anybody cares and if not [Music] you know so let's get into it one such title that's been on my mind for a while released about a year ago cyber hook developed by blazing stick is a first person platforming speed running title that might sound like a mouthful but it's actually become a relatively popular genre in the past few years so what makes this game cyber hook different well it's it's not really the cyber part we got a lot of those already it's the hook you get a grappling hook which i love in my games a lot of people love these but this one's special rather than simply point shoot and fly over in a linear path this hook functions more like spider-man webs it's actually more so than even the spider-man games i mean you gotta account for your speed while you're running and the angle you shoot in the direction you're facing in the moment you let go and there's some clever rope physics along the way and see it's still a grappling hook so you still get to gain speed towards whatever object you're you know grabbing you're hooking besides this you have wall running a double jump a shootie gun finger and the ability to slow down time there is a limit to how much you can slow down time and you kind of don't want to do it too much because it you know that it doesn't stop the timer but it can also allow you to grab onto legends further away than if you didn't use it so it's kind of important the game itself is split into several worlds with quite a few levels i i don't know the exact number i did not count but it's a lot there's a story of sorts it's more or less save the princess except instead you gotta go home you have to go home because you're stuck in cyber hook world with this robot sadly the ending of the game is based around the concept that 10 000 people have completed the game and then something will happen and i don't know if 10 000 people beat this game i think there's dlc coming out so maybe so what about these actual levels they're pretty well designed honestly and they consist of four distinct elements you got the blue blocks and they're nice and you can hook onto them and you can run on the walls and it's a safe it's a safe nice blue block you got the yellow blocks which you can't hook onto but you can wall run purple blocks will kill you if you touch them but you can hook onto them and red blocks will kill you and you can't hook onto them there is one more hazard which is these robots and they'll shoot you and either gotta outrun them or you shoot them first but nah it's it's fine it's tame it's only in a few levels so if you really don't like it you know obviously the main draw in this game is that hook that core hooking mechanic and it works well it works well maintaining momentum requires both decent accuracy and a good understanding of angles maintaining that speed is important if you double jump while you're going up you're going to lose speed so most of the time you just want to have the hook do all the work the sprinting is fast and you can build up speed pretty quickly but not as much as the hook so yeah by the end of the game all of this needs to be done with pretty expert precision or at least mildly expert precision it's not the hardest game out there that's not what i'm saying but on these three star challenges by the end it's it's pretty tough it's been a while since i played this game last before getting all this footage so i'm not setting any world records here these kind of games always draw me in because i like the idea of just having a rope in a game just a simple rope then you attach it to something and you swing a lot of games have this but most give you a pretty big handicap i need stuff like that is that is that really a grappling hook is that really a web slinging cyber hook doesn't go all the way i mean there's still some elements such as lower overall gravity in the world that makes it a bit easier but the difference in speed you can build up by doing everything just right it's it's worth it it's pretty good it makes you feel like a big swinging monkey that's all i want to be something that's pretty cool are these transparent blocks if you hook onto them you can pass through them and build up as much speed as you want you can even fly out of bounds which honestly i had no idea you could do that after 100 hours of play in this game i have to assume these were intended for this use because there's a lot of levels that if you aim just right you can just skip to the end on the shorter tracks i mean you're better off just trying to do it regularly because it takes a while to build up that speed after getting back into the game after so long it felt weird to play at first because by default you have to press spacebar to detach your hook and luckily these can all be turned off at a dedicated speed running options menu you can just make it just a button press something i gotta bring up here is the overall vibe yeah this is your synth wave retro wave you get the point yeah i i can't say this is the best decision in my mind because there's so many games that do that i mean the whole resurgence of the 80s thing kind of came and went almost 10 years ago now this doesn't really affect the game itself but it certainly affects how it appears i think to other people because yeah first glance it just seems like oh it's another synthwave retrowave 80s throwback visually most of the game is i mean it's cubes it does what it needs to do the background of each level is uh this art which you know i'd like if that was not there in every single level but whatever it seems like in the dlc they're changing that a bit the music is it's fine you know it's synthwave but honestly most of the time i'm playing these kind of games i'm not listening to the soundtrack one element of these titles that always concerns me is the leaderboards i'm sure you've seen it especially in indie games but they tend to get broken really quickly you have outlandish impossible times but here it seems to be working the only concern i have is apparently there is a patch and before the patch a lot of skips were possible that are not possible now so some of these times might just be you can't do them there is one final note and i'm sure it's one a lot of people won't like this game isn't on xbox or playstation it's only on the pc and apparently there's a switch port i don't know how well that would go over personally i could not imagine playing this game on a controller that's not to say i wouldn't like to see it happen i mean but you know it's gonna be pretty tough without that without a mouse without a little rat attack tap for me these kind of games the ones that have basically no story in our pickup and play built upon the leaderboards and just playing the same level over and over again to do better i can easily sink hours a day into these but this one's special because there's no defined route the most obvious straightforward path to get to the end goal is never the fastest so it's mostly about experimentation and when it's these indie titles you also get the feeling of discovery because not everything has been found in these games especially in the early days it wouldn't be that uncommon to find some skip that no one else had found on the leaderboards and rise all the way up having a hook going around swinging through town that's cyberhuck yup [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Whimsu

Views: 10,867

Rating: 4.958271 out of 5

Keywords: Indie, indie game, new games, game news, good games, top games, video games, PC game, steam, nintendo, switch, mouse and keyboard, controller, game console, pc gaming, cyber hook, cyber hook game, game review, game overview, game retrospective, whimsu, whimsu game reviews, switch games, Nintendo Switch games, steam fest, steam games, steam titles, valve, speed running, speedrunning, leaderboards, time trials, speedruns, speedrunning games

Id: MDydXjGd5gI

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021