Hannah’s Day Review | PC

The current game market has been flowing with lots of new ideas, especially coming from a minority of people who struggle with life and how to choose their own destinies. Video games have become a tool to allow gamers to live the ideal life, as they can portray their characters becoming more self-centered, not being able to consider what we see in real life as mandatory or required to live through. Sure, we can say devoting a huge chunk of your life to becoming better at your hobbies can lead to financial stability, but it’s far off from what reality portrays in our daily lives.

 

The story starts with Hannah's introduction. She is a lively girl with the intention of being a world-known musician with her friends. Although everything sounds okay, there are a few problems that stop her plans to become an artist, mainly her parents wanting her to build a career in business and her bandmates being far away from music since they graduated.

Hannah doesn’t want to stop chasing her dreams though, she wants to get everyone together and live the best dream of her life. Of course, without any motivation or reason to get away from her parents, she could not make that dream come true, so she ran away from her home to gather her friends.

The use of smartphones and social media helps a lot during her task to get her friends as they are just one tap away from her- though this also has the negative effect of her parents trying to reach her and stop her from investing time in being a musician. Combined with bad thoughts running around in her mind and needing to get away from stuff, she hops on her skateboard and puts on some tunes.

Although the game is basically set upon its theme and narrative, gameplay is completely different from what you might think. It is a 2D and 3D platformer with collectathon sub-genre added to it. Hannah can skate through buildings and towns, collect notes, help individuals with their tasks, and solve puzzles in various difficulties. Not going to lie, I thought Hannah’s Day was going to be a simple 2D platformer with puzzle elements first but the more I played it, the more surprised I got.

 

The first mechanic you are being taught is being able to change the gravitational pull of Hannah in one single press. Whenever there is a light under the skateboard of Hannah, you can press the space bar to let her ride her skateboard on the ceiling. Of course, this helps with going with getting through blockades, collecting notes, and solving puzzles. While the mechanic is great, it takes a bit of a long time for Hannah to change her orientation, therefore it might just get a bit dizzy for you- and her- to get onto the right surface to continue skating.

Once you beat the first level, the game transitions into a 3D world with a linear path to take, these paths usually include some side missions, such as helping individuals with finding certain items and other people in the selected level. Considering Hannah is a sweetie pie, I always wanted to keep royal to her personality and help everyone I met on the way. It doesn’t actually increment your skills or status, you only get a result screen stating how many music notes you collected, people helped, etc, therefore you are not obliged to do every side mission you see.

Hannah’s Day continues to surprise me even more with its tilt mechanic, where you can use your arrow keys or right analog stick to push the world in the world position wanted. This mechanic is also crucial as you need to fix some of the puzzles you come across with it. Since Hannah’s Day includes a real-time physics model, you can move objects around with the tilt mechanic.

One example was a barman asking for drinks at the end of the runway, so what you had to do was tilt the world downwards and the pack of drinks would slide down through the road. But mainly, you will be using the tilt mechanic for main puzzles to hop from one puzzle to another.

 

In terms of difficulty, Hannah’s Day does not portray any challenge and it is pretty well-suited for people for a chill story with narrative meanings. Hannah usually talks a lot to portray her feelings about becoming a musician and explaining why she believes in herself more than her parents and anyone who stands in her way.

Normally, you’d expect Hannah’s- or any character's- speech to be rather annoying or unbearable. On the contrary, English voice actors did a pretty good job. The quality is crisp, you can hear the enthusiasm in the character’s lines, and big kudos to Hannah’s voice actor, who did a very solid job. Too bad I couldn’t find who it was in the credits, sad.

Since Hannah’s Day constantly brings up the main topic of music and how it changes the lives of people, you would expect background music and sound effects to be more in the front too. Unfortunately, most of the background music either got blended in with sound effects or was dull enough to not make an impact on me, which is quite ironic, since the whole point is to bring the band back together, write a song, and be famous.

Hannah’s Day, a cute and artistic showcase of following your dreams, also executes the idea of a young female lead, trying to prove to her parents and the whole world that getting a professional occupation degree is not mandatory for feeling well and secure. Hannah, our protagonist, has a personality filled with positivity and passion for music, however, her parents are too keen on her becoming a business executive instead, as it surely does make more money than being an amateur musician.

 

Now, I wouldn’t say that is not technically wrong. Music, as an art form, has recently forgotten its roots and shifted towards securing deals with labels and getting streams on music platforms. It is all because artists would like to have money rather than get their name out for being successful musicians. In other ways, the way to make money out of the music industry is becoming less and less artistical and pumping out meaningless content.

Since Hannah’s Day is a mere creation of fiction and fantasy, Hannah’s intention of bringing back the band together after graduation seems like a way to make a living. But for real life, it’s more of a struggle as real-life artists still need to work on jobs to get the equipment or simply to get through life.

In fact, this idea was proven right after 30 minutes of gameplay. Hannah needs to meet up with Nick to get the band back together. But surprise surprise, he works at the amusement park as a street vendor because he is aware that being a musician won’t keep him economically secure. He promises to get back to the band but he still thinks of the business he has to attend.

I wish the game at least portrayed the reality of the artists better. They all know that being a leading member of society in terms of culture and knowledge unfortunately doesn’t pay them well, That’s why the parents are trying to convince Hannah for her own good while she is supposedly diving into a dead or luck-based profession. While playing Hannah’s Day, I felt a bit sad because it shouldn’t be a fantasy or a dream for a person to follow their passion in art and still make a living.
 

 

Hannah’s Day is created with love and enthusiasm for art in mind and plays very well on the surface too, but the idea of art being able to keep people economically secure is wrong. A similar title by the name of Cook Serve Forever also had the roots of a rookie becoming a nation-wide popular chef by just working at a street restaurant, but the idea is at least reasonable as food is a source that people would be willing to spend their money, hence it is important to become an important chef.

But by today’s standards, being a musician is as same as just being unemployed. Sometimes a man can dream of working on his dream passion while being happy, but we have passed that point already…

Atilla Turan (@burningarrow)
Editor, NoobFeed