Idle gaming has its place in the ecosphere of modern entertainment. Developers across the world understand that players have divided attention spans as well as limited time to engage with some titles. Being able to have something that asks for a few clicks and some background CPU power in exchange for good graphics, goofy storylines and, occasionally, a bit of lewdness is enough to drive multiple devs to give it a go. Personally, I haven’t enjoyed it, but that’s because I prefer to be more hands on with my gameplay: if it’s going to occupy my time at all, I might as well be doing something with it. Which, unfortunately, is why Horripilant is such a horrific miss. Despite me truly liking the concept and, to some extent, the execution, there’s a fatal flaw. The idea and execution are good: where the game chooses to land is truly a misstep.

JUST ANOTHER MANIC MONDAAAAAAAY.

The setup is a wonderful bit of grim and gothic storytelling. Awakening in a camp somewhere deep in a forgotten dungeon, you are compelled by a disembodied voice to move forward. There’s only a fire, a locked door, a hole and a sapling. Hit the sapling, get some wood. The wood can be converted into a weapon and armor. Now, suddenly, a dungeon stairway presents itself. Enter, slay the beasts inside until you cannot anymore, and limp back to safety with their desiccated meat in hand. Sacrifice the meat to the sapling to make it grow, and get more wood. The sapling will not die. Harvest resources and heed the call to move forward. And, if you cannot go further, become reborn and start the cycle again. Somewhere is the truth. Somewhere is salvation.

Horripilant wears three hats to get the player through the game. The first is an idle game, which is the crux of it all. When you find the sapling (and other material farms later), you hire other beasties to extract the wood, stone and iron while you’re going into the dungeon. The material you collect is what you use to invest in expansion, so there’s incentive to keep constantly collecting. You’ll hit the cap of how much can be stored fairly quickly, so you need to be aware of the tipping point for each of the levels. That is to say, you start off with a fairly innocuous amount (20 wood), and each expansion is exponential, so leveling up your horde of mice, crows, skeletons and further faceless monsters to farm while you dungeon dive is important. Kind of.

Behold, what your active focus is for the majority of the game.

There’s also a clicking element to Horripilant which is very necessary and, at times, exhausting. The farming of material is slow going, especially at the beginning, so you need to manually engage with the tree/rock/iron deposit. Coming from Steam origins, Horripilant porting to console means certain concessions needed to be made, and button controls, thank God, are one of them. When you lock in on farming manually, just hold down the button. Don’t be like me and mash the A over and over till your brain melts. Hold down A and let the goods flow. Occasionally there’ll be a sparkle on screen that you hit a different button for (ZR) to attain a decent cache of materials, but the sparkle won’t disappear until you hit it, so don’t feel like you need to be on top of this at all points.

But having said that, you’re still clicking. You click to get materials. You click to attack the weak points that show up on enemies because…what else can you do? If you don’t click, you wait. And wait. And you do a whole lot of waiting because the stakes increase dramatically and constantly. 200 or 20,000 materials to collect doesn’t take long in terms of waiting, but 200,000,000? It’s a LOT. And you’ve got this game system at your home (I’m on Switch 2, but it’s all modern machines), and it’s not like a PC. You can’t just tab over into another window and chill while the game plays itself. You have to stare at it and be invested in this grim, pixel art world that is asking you to just do something else while it does its thing.

You can tell he’s a boss because he’s shiny. And the Pride Month name tag.

Horripilant also isn’t a straightforward task of just idling and clicking, which is good and bad. There’s a point and click aspect of exploring the dungeon that is, and I mean this sincerely, unbelievably slow to the point of being forgotten. You can, very quickly, discover a key to unlock another room within the dungeon, and that’s exciting. Then you can wait something to the tune of six idle hours to finally amass enough stuff from within the dungeon to get to the next room. This small bit of puzzling is negligible in the grand scope of things, but it’s part of the storytelling, and that’s at the backbone of why you’re moving forward. 

Same with the reincarnation mechanic. Successful dungeon dives get you this extra material that can be used to improve your overall effectiveness. You can make weapon and armor leveling cheaper, increase starting stats and levels, and, eventually, unlock the INCREDIBLY helpful perk of allowing resources to be transferred between respawns. This whole section of the game lends credence to the concept of an actual game, with actual, creepy story points that lean towards something bigger, more sinister, and more exciting than what you’re doing for 99% of the game itself. If there was a way to boil past the core element of Horripilant and enjoy all that unfolds within, I would do it.

Invest in your future before preparing to reset everything and start from zero!

Instead, you’re spending countless amounts of time waiting and, occasionally, watching. Diving into the dungeons is auto-battling while your collective of beasties farm materials. Defeat a boss monster, get a boon, move onto the next floor. Watch numbers go up. Keep watching numbers go up. Look away from your Switch. Go do something else, probably check your phone or grab a bite to eat. Come back, numbers are still going up. You can set the exit floor and leave the dungeon with all your materials. You can get killed and need to escape, dropping some but not all materials. You can choose a boon when the boss goes down, or just let the game choose for you. It doesn’t matter. Numbers go up, then you buy stuff and numbers go down.

Look. This game is probably a chill and interesting time on the PC. There’s no soundtrack, just sound effects from the fighting and various game moments. You can let the game run itself for many minutes, come back, spend a few seconds to upgrade your gear and your farming, and then let it get back to work. Yes, there are items you can buy and use, but you don’t need to. They exist, just like you barely exist. Maybe this game is an analogy to nihilism and the pointless drive to chase numbers. Maybe it’s a commentary on the church. I don’t know and I frankly couldn’t care less because it’s supposed to be a game. Why the hell am I using my luxury distraction box to run a piece of software that I can’t even interact with? Why are you letting it monopolize your screen?

This lore and these designs are fascinating, CAN I ACTUALLY ENGAGE WITH THEM PLEASE????

Horripilant is interesting, there’s no disputing that. The design is awesome, I love the graphics. I love that the avatars are all from other Black Lantern Collective titles. But this could have and should have stayed on PC. Trying to do this on a console is so bizarrely tiresome and pointless. You need hours upon hours of truly wasted time to find out what’s happening, and you could just scrub through a YouTube video to find out instead. This is for PC: it doesn’t belong on consoles.

Horripilant is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Horripilant was provided by the publisher.