Hippocampal: The White Sofa

Had this game was removed from my steam library IDK why was a odd game

So I found this in my library.
It seems that I got it in an old bundle years ago.
The name didn't ring any bell.
I clicked on "Store Page" before installing it half sure that the page wouldn't exist anymore, but it did, and the game preview was quite different from anything I tried to picture out of a sea creature on an Ikea piece of equipment.
And then, in the corner of my eyes, a color I am not used to see much showing "Mostly Negative" reviews...
At this point I was too far in to just forget about it, so I installed it.

Well... 37 minutes later it was over.

The description is pretentious. There is nothing satirical in the direction.
No depth to be found, just an immature product, an abstract experience leaving a bitter taste.

People are free to do whatever they want, and sell their product, but had I payed for it, I would have felt robbed.
And the developers even dare write in the game
" In the very end we are not ashamed since we are all rebels "
Well shame on them anyway.

It is still sold today, I even see a promotion making it less than 1 Euro.
Well keep that euro and get a Popsicle.
It is tastier, will last you longer, and you will feel refreshed.

I purchased the game in June 2014 because I had thought it looks like a funny, absurdist game experience that parodies horror and exploration games of the time. Then I forgot about it. At the beginning of 2023 I discovered it again in my library and decided to play it as I was looking for the most obscure games around.

I regret every second of it. The game is about finding hidden objects in an absurd environment, which is fair enough, but it starts with awful controls, inconsistent graphics, lackluster animations and even more awful sound and music. Everything in this game is awful and I don't know how I managed to play this game to the finish, maybe I had hoped the ending would be worth it but of course I was so very wrong.

This game feels like it was the assignment for a class and quickly developed over the course of a weekend because the developer had procrastinated before the deadline a lot. I understand that, I do that too, but please do not try to sell the result!

Avoid at any and all cost.

This is trolling the consumer in the most garish way I've ever seen.
You get a hour of slowly floating around different nonsensical, difficult to navigate places at a snail's pace, collecting collectibles, and then game over.
There are no redeeming qualities to this piece of software in the slightest. No commentary, no pleasing visuals, no engaging gameplay. Nothing. Avoid, even if heavily discounted.

I knew this was a very abstract, low-budget, conceptual game before booting it up, and can appreciate brief, minimalistic gaming experiences. Unfortunately the effects and scenes / levels this game generates to navigate are pretty bland and the immersion is lost as you drift down boring corridors with what look like Silent Hill Monster Spacemen floating about and twitching in the background. The game does very little to make the player interested in navigating to the next scene, with the same few models doing a different twitching animation in the corner of some dark area which might say have RED lighting instead of GREEN lighting in the previous corridor / corner. While I wouldn't say it's a horrible experience I'd just say it's more of a waste of time than anything and not very memorable or affective to any player investment or emotion.

Tags: Adventure - WS - Walking Simulator
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library

TLDR: Will make you physically sick, Buggy, Narratively meaningless, An absolute chore to play

This is what would happen if a dev made a bad walking simulator then felt spiteful and added a bunch of irritation on top of his bad game to make sure that no enjoyment could ever be obtained out of his product. Can get stuck on invisible edges - be pulled or prevented from going in directions for no reason at some time and not at other times. Buggy - sometimes can enter invisible walls causing you to be stuck outside the areas you should be in.

Bad controls - very minimal and bad sound design - a maze-like level design where walls are lateral and vertical metal bars that interconnect each other (as you see through the wall) making navigation a jumbled mess. Dev seemed to almost troll by having boxes go through walls but push you around for no reason delaying and hindering your exploration, creatures and scenery are heavily reused everywhere, must often go to one end of the map to unlock something in an area previously explored and the game gives no indication of that forcing you to re-explore entire levels multiple times to progress - Dev added many scenes where creatures and the few scenery elements present are also sideways on walls and ceilings, causing me genuine vertigo and motion sickness.

Whenever progress is made the player is rewarded by depictions of astronaut with buckets on their head or cutscenes of seahorses up close with a comical ¨you fail¨ high pitched trumpet

Narratively there is no text or dialogue, and the game converys very little other than a fairly perceptible disdain from the dev for the customers, with nonsensical fetch questing of meaningless objects though a trial and error method

To top it all off this game made it on steam through a loophole of steam greenlight where the dev used the pass for a different title to smuggle this in, and apparently weaseled out of giving bundle keys to legitimate purchasers of his game. Another one of his game he patched retroactively so it would stop launching (vigil bitterness) and would instead open the steam store page for RIP trilogy instead...

I can't reccomend you BUY this product as I got it as a gift from a friend.

That aside, if you enjoy really short, REALLY fucked up games, buy away!

Making no sense but being sufficiently entertaining for the duration of play it is definitely worth a quick play, but not a quick buy.

Where do i even start with this "game". The level design is awful, all of the walls and floors are some kind of bar texture which hurts your eyes and makes it hard to see anyway. The game doesn't make any sense at all, there are "enemies" on walls, ceilings and floors which can't seem to hurt you but i did find out that if you stand still infront of them they try to hit you. Also a feature i haven't seen mentioned in the other reviews is that this is literally moonbase alpha, by accident i hit a macro on my keyboard and all of a sudden i heard the well known moonbase alpha text to speech voice, if you press y you can bring up a chat, this allows you to say anything in text to speech with the exact same voice as moonbase alpha (JOHN MADDEN JOHN MADDEN JOHN MADDEN). Now i haven't played enough moonbase alpha to know whether this is literally the same game but with different levels, but it seems very similar. The camera also has some kind of smoothing effect or something which keeps the camera moving for a short period even after you've stopped moving the mouse. The developer says this game is two things in the description, satirical and contemplative. I really do fail to see how this game is satirical, it says "we are mocking the hero, game characters, movies, comic books and video games we liked.", not quite sure how the main character is mocked during the game (or atleast as far as i got up to) and i haven't seen a single reference up to now to game characters, movies, comic books or video games. They say that the game is contemplative because "you just have to walk through this world to understand how it works.", i don't understand how this "game" is contemplative at all. Unless i'm missing some kind of deeper meaning, flying around a maze of bars and collecting meaningless items is not contemplative. Overall this game is probably one of the worst "games" i've ever played, and i've played the slaughtering grounds...

0/10

This game could be summed up simply with: What The Fuck. Not an angry WTF, but a confused one. This game is a nonsensical jabbering, coalesced into a mass of indecipherable parodic satire that makes zero sense to anyone playing it.

"Hippocampal is a satiric, contemplative game"
No, it's not. It's a confusing "find the hidden objects game". You float slowly through incoherent levels filled with neon lights, alien creatures, and badly fitting music and sound effects.

Your actual goals are very unclear and even if you do figure out what to do there is no payoff: you simply collect the crap in one level and are dumped in the next one following a weird cutscene.

On top of that the game is unstable. For such a small game you'd expect it to run well but I seem to be getting very low FPS and also got two crashes.

Avoid.

I read the bad reviews, I thought I had an idea of what was going to happen in this game, "I just wander around n' look at weird shit, good deal". But I was very horribly wrong. You just slowly meander through a maze of god awful disgusting indistinguishable textures while the exact same character model is placed everywhere. I unknowingly flew over the invisible walls on the second map and couldn't make it back in to another stupid piece of shit maze. And the noises... God damn the fucking constant barrage of annoying sounds. I never felt so robbed over 25 cents in my life...

Do you enjoy listening to Hansen, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice? Do you enjoy throwing away your loose change? Do you enjoy watching bad movies from the 80's on VHS? If you answered yes to any of these questions I'd recommend you stop reading my review and immediately purchase this game, you'll love it. For the rest of us do yourself a favor, click not interested and by all means, even during a steam sale, when you see it for 49 cent... don't buy it..

So my warning wasn't enough and you want to know what this game is about.... well aside from trying and failing to be a video game anybody on the face of Earth will like, you are an Astronaut who has found yourself floating in space... We'll ignore the fact that no spaceship, capsule, satellite or anything needed to keep a human being in space alive, seems to be anywhere in sight, and the fact your character floats freely through space asleep and oblivious to everything around him....

Out of the dark recesses of space come the P men.... or as I like to call them... PU men, cause they stink just as much as this game... They strike your character sending him hurling towards what looks to be Earth... Instead of burning into a crispy little ball of flame (which I'd have happily handed over my .49 cent to see) you somehow manage to come down unscathed, bounce a few times and then somehow wake up in the magical land of... WTF were the developers taking when they created this World. or CashGrab Land as I'll call.

Inside CashGrab land you float from one point to another, using arrows, messages and other assorted random things to find your way around. If you ever played an 80's game when you would spend hours wandering around the same dungeon looking for your next objective you'll understand this game... The only difference is you'll be floating past PU creatures for no apparent reason, searching for beach equipment.... Why!.... Who knows why, I suppose the developers thought Space is like a vast ocean and tried to put some hidden message into their game..... NA they just didn't care...

So wander around this CashGrab Land for a few hours, find your beach stuff and enjoy this game... err well actually no enjoyment will be found or had with this game, it just drains your soul.. much like a succubus after 3 hours of playing the only thing left to do is drool on yourself until someone comes along and frees you from it's sucktastic grip.....

Bought this cheap in a steam sale for under $1. I liked the sound of what it offered and at that price its worth a gamble. Turns out my gamble did not pay off.

Problem is even with a PC well in advance of minimal requirements I can't get it to run well. Tried 3 times. foirst time was laggy and slow so I quit and rebooted. Second time was still laggy and slow so I tried using tab and accessing the console to improve performance. Third time it blue screen of deathed me. Uninstall time!

I might give it a go again in the future on a different PC/laptop but for now its unplayable. A pity as I really wanted to give this game a decent go.

Honestly, the game is a mess in every aspect. It's even torturous to play because of how poorly it runs and how poorly it controls. If the gameplay was more fluid I would only be left bewildered (although not in a good way), because this game is fucking strange. In a pointless sort of strange. What am I doing, what is this mess on my screen, why is there now a rave going on, wtf was that thing... why seahorse, why have you done this to me, why.
Sadly though, simply moving around the world is a struggle. It would be difficult to get from point A to point B, if thats all you were doing. But you are expected to explore a very confusing world, that can at times appear as though someone ate an entire bag of pixels and proceeded to vomit them haphazardly around my screen.

I can't recommend to this to anyone, at all, ever. Not even as a joke.

"Walk through this world to understand how it works!"
Both parts of this statement are false. You neither walk through the world (you float) nor will you come to anything other than the vaguest understanding of how it works.
A very strange, dream-like game that can be completed in a single sitting.
The lack of any settings or v-sync is a bit of a problem however.

This game is an ugly broken mess.
The level design is horrendous. It's a sore to the eye and the gameplay is barely something one could call gameplay. You just fly through weird dark corridors and collect things while observing strange cutscenes that try to be funny.

To me absolutely not worth a single penny. I hope no one actually paid the full 5 bucks for this.

It's slow, it's boring, it's not in any way funny or clever. Nor is it actually satiric or contemplative, despite what the developer claims.

The way it works is, you float extremely slowly through three confusing but dull maps, looking for the four special floating objects that are secreted here and there. The scenery around you is surreal, but not in an exciting, interesting or thought-provoking way. Just in an it's-confusing-to-figure-out-where-you're-supposed-to-go-because-game-design-principles-went-out-the-window-and-everything-looks-the-same-as-everything-else way. There are exactly three animated character models in the game and they get resused ad nauseum. There are maybe half that many textures for the floors, walls, and ceilings.
If you 100% the game, you unlock three special endings which display those same three character models floating in different but equally unexciting ways and some scrolling text which says something about not being ashamed because we are all rebels. So, there. Now you know.

Seriously, don't bother. Not even for 50 cents. Go watch a Let's Play, since you'll experience the same depth of gameplay just watching it instead of playing it, and you can fastforward through the dull bits. (The whole game is the dull bits.)

I consider myself open to game-as-art. The issue with this game is that it lacks any coherence or execution. While making a "WTF worthy" game might be interesting for half a second, with no core discernable message the whole experience falls flat.

Level design is horrible, requiring the player to trial and error there way through to various objectives- In fact I would liken the level design to the worst parts of classic adventure games: half an hour of "is this where I need to go? No? Repeat".

Sound design may actually be worse than level design. I can put up with poorly designed levels as long as the soundtrack/scape is decent enough. Sadly, that was not the case. The game features no music (save for the few seconds of relief after completing a checkpoint worthy event) and the sound effects of "busy city center" and "bugged out generic jetpack noises" can only be listened to on continuous repeat for a maximum of five minutes before you feel like committing ear-seppuku in front of your moniter.

To sum up:

Concept is bad, level design is bad, sound design is bad, and now my ears breath their last breaths with honor intact.

Nice try. But here's a thought: A game needs order and meaning to deliver apparent chaos and meaningless. You just made a 3D maze. Nothing to see here.

So let´s bring some light into the mysterious dark that is "Hippocampal: The White Sofa": It is a completely self-aware and funny exploration game that has a VERY special, quiet and somehow hidden kind of humour that I enjoyed and that mixes up with goofy moments whenever you accomplish a target. It´s very short and the atmosphere is unique, yet it may not be worth the asked price. The gameplay is simple at best, confusing at first, but once you ge the grip of it it somehow "works". The physics are neat, the story is rubbish but the entertaining sort and while I obviously can´t recommend it to everyone, I had a decent enough time with it and if you enjoy experimental games and want to know what the hell this actually is, then you may grab it if it ever comes on sale. Oh, and if you know Tale of Tales and find em ridiculous this is THE game for you :D

Destilled meaningless cryptic bull'.
Inflict it on your enemies, annoying siblings, and that one friend that owes you money.
You might get some fun out of giving it to someone as a joke, just don't buy it with the intention of enjoying it yourself.