Look, if you’ve got a dream, you gotta chase it. There are millions of people who exist in this world, and probably tens of billions across history, who had an idea or a vision that never came to fruition because they never tried. Not everything is going to work out, and calculated risk is an important factor. If you 100% think you could be the next big streamer, figure out how to go at it without going over your head. Your family will not respect you for dropping out of school and going five figures in debt to make videos about playing HuniePop 2 that get six clicks a week. Go after your dream with realistic expectations and help. Know that you can’t do everything. Be bold, but cautious. And take the extra time to get input and QA before you release a game like Oops! You’re the Hero.

No problem, but I’m going to need that hour of my life back.

On paper, it’s a fine concept to get into: the fantasy world of Othaya, where a Goddess has split the powers of good and darkness (not light and dark, or good and evil, which is a choice) into two hearts. One, the heart of darkness, is found by a sorceress who immediately understands the assignment and starts recruiting giant monsters to destroy everything and rule the ruins. The other is a thief who discovers the “good” heart in a temple, sees that it’s shiny, and promptly steals it. The heart came with the unfortunate caveat of Tut Puff, a floating cloud being who talks incessantly, follows you everywhere and also urges you to do good. As a thief, this is low on your list of priorities, but now the choices exist. What will you do, oh ignoble antihero? Rise to the occasion, or slink into the shadows?

As a 3D action/adventure title, Oops! You’re the Hero is straightforward, which is great, because you’ll never get a more skeletal framework to start out. There’s no adjusting the difficulty, changing the frame or literally anything other than volume adjustment. The game isn’t particularly long, clocking in at about an hour with a lot of that going towards you walking through large, mostly empty establishments. A deeply confusing game, the whole thing is you steal the heart, escape the temple, go the long way around to get to another temple, and then drop off the heart. Along the way there’s some quests to be done or ignored, bosses you mostly have to fight, and exposition that I think is trying to tell a story about rejecting preconceived notions and going your own way, but it really could be as shallow as “what is a hero didn’t do his job?”

I mean, this was a little funny.

I won’t sugar coat it: this game was both a slog and a pain to get through. First and foremost, it’s all keyboard controls, which shouldn’t be so bad. After all, I grew up with DOOM and Wolfenstein, not to mention playing Secret of Monkey Island exclusively with the keyboard. But the choice to bind movement to WASD while still incorporating spacebar to attack and shift to pick up things is a bizarre one if you won’t have the hero scoot around with the arrow keys. These resulting choices made navigation feel antithetical to how you’d imagine gameplay working. The result was something deeply unsatisfying that also caused physical discomfort with how awkward it was trying to walk and hold shift at the same time. Moving in the game was like watching a 3D movie without the glasses. You got the gist but it was clearly off.

There’s this idea in Oops! You’re the Hero of being able to make choices to see how that affects the overall world, but it didn’t quite work. For example, there’s this village early on that’s under siege, and you can go through and beat up the baddies to make life better for the townsfolk. Or, you could not. Tut Puff will briefly lecture you on being a good person, but going back to solve the town’s problem doesn’t do anything. In fact, there’s even this moment of the Thief asking if what they just did meant anything, and Tut blithely replies that “if you don’t feel different, then it didn’t do anything.” I guess that means the real journey is how the player is affected and not the character. The best part of any video game is when it gets sanctimonious and teaches you stuff you didn’t ask to learn.

But could I? If I asked really nicely? Starting now?

In fact, the entire narrative is deeply confusing. You’ve got a bunch of folk with no names – Thief, Wizard, Sorceress, Goddess – who are trying to play roles that don’t suit them. Wizard pairs up with Sorceress to be a brief but annoying boss, and then it doesn’t matter afterwards. Sorceress seems to have gotten the Dark Heart because why not, but then actively works towards stopping and preventing evil from spreading. Goddess is SO ANGRY that a Thief took the Good Heart, but also does nothing to try and rectify any of the events. It’s bit characters in charade positions that seem to always look towards the camera. Like the game is daring you to say “Wait, could this mean I might be something different?” All the adventure is missing is a “Hang in There, Kitty” poster in the forest and it’d be my middle school counsellor all over again.

Not to mention the game is just tedious as all get out. The graphics are fine, and the portraits of the various characters are well drawn and almost quaint, but the world is an endless wall of geometric barriers that aren’t clearly mapped out. You’ll have your character disappear behind barriers and you just sort of hope you’re still walking the right way. What appears to be a path will just suddenly stop letting you move forward even if there’s no visual stoppage. It feels like the development team really wanted the game to feel bigger than it actually is, so there’s just an elongation of unnecessary dead space to make it seem like more is happening than there really is. You didn’t need to put four rooms of nothing in the cavern to get to that key, it could have just been next door for the same effect.

THROW YOUR FINS IN THE AIR IF YOU’RE FEELING FINE, WE’RE GONNA SWIM INTO OVERTIME.

Combat, one of the few active elements of Oops! You’re the Hero is little more than button mashing. You have a sword and rope in your inventory. Using the rope essentially stuns the enemy for a moment while you wail on them with your weapon. The rope is unlimited, the enemies have clear hit boxes, and the area of their attack is well telegraphed. The biggest difficulty came not from the final boss (which was almost embarrassingly easy to defeat), but from an aquatic behemoth with multiple tentacles, which all needed to be dispatched. Which meant spending more time sailing around on your boat and wasting time until you could get a clear shot in, then repeating over and over. Again, this is a beast employed by the Sorceress, who almost immediately regrets doing so, and does nothing but hang out in the water till you bash in its head.

Lastly, fail states. C’mon, people. We have all the development tools in the world at our disposal right now, and QA is more important than ever in making sure your game is well crafted and ready for primetime. If an exploding barrel is important to opening up the next branch of the game, ensure the barrel always respawns. The early barrels did in what was little more than the tutorial area. So why make the barrels one-time appearances later on, when you need to get through barricades and your character is prone to accidentally hurling the barrel when you cross some invisible and arbitrary threshold? The game isn’t very long, but having to do anything again when you really don’t want to is aggravating. Ask anyone who’s had to reset their dot during marching band practice because a clarinet crossed the hashmark too late. Specific, but relatable.

Sorry guys, love to help, but I tossed that barrel by accident and, well, barrels are now extinct.

I hate to crap on indie titles, but Oops! You’re the Hero just wasn’t fun. It’s short while feeling long, teaching me nothing, bringing little to the table and not inspiring me to revisit it. From lack of controller support to janky, obtuse maps, it’s a pain to get through with no reward at the end. There could be more to come, but, from where the game is right now, there’s no reason for anyone to want to dawn this mantle.

Oops! You’re the Hero is available now on PC.

Reviewed on AMD Ryzen 5 3400GE with Radeon Vega Graphics and 16GB RAM.

A copy of Oops! You’re the Hero was provided by the publisher.