Rating of
4/5
Variations on a Very Nostalgic Theme
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/11/25
“Hatchwell” is the inaugural effort by solo Philippines-based Indie developer, Adrian Corpuz, known by the studio name, AdeeCee. While AdeeCee has gone on to release a second game, with a third in the works, none of this Indie dev’s efforts are in the same genre. What caught my attention with “Hatchwell” was that it was a very deliberate homage to one of my personal all-time favorite games, “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.” So, how does a $10 Indie game compare with one of Nintendo’s all-time achievements? Fairly well! Though, better in some aspects than others.
Presentation
“Hatchwell” is a pixel-art game built, surprisingly NOT in Unity, but in Yoyo Games’ GameMaker Studio engine. From an artistic perspective, “Hatchwell” is a bit of a mixed bag. While environments and enemies are generally pleasant and straddle the divide between the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, the numerous NPCs who inhabit the game world are generally quite bland to look at and aren’t particularly well animated. There are also numerous occasions where cutscenes will revolve around characters’ faces appearing in boxes along with various other random objects in the area ALSO appearing in boxes. These character portraits are generally quite unappealing, with a very Early Childhood look about them, but even more disconcerting is the fact that everyone in the game is literally dead-eyed, with no iris or pupil visible. The result of this unfortunate character design combined with the random objects getting their own portrait boxes during conversations gives the game a strong feeling of simulated Autism.
The soundtrack is generally extremely plain and nothing to write home about. It DOES have a very strong core theme, which is iterated upon for absolutely every track. However, this theme is very simple and basic. It gets the job done, and is unobtrusive and not-annoying, but is far from memorable.
Technically, “Hatchwell” is pretty solid, but for a few bizarre design choices. The game is stable and the only glitch I experienced was the fact that it refuses to launch in fullscreen mode and disregards fullscreen in its internal settings, requiring a quick Alt+Enter at the start of each session. However, the developer is very responsive to feedback in the game’s Steam forum, resulting in other people finding glitches and getting them fixed quickly. However, I can’t help but be baffled by the game’s default Xinput layout. Instead of using the Start and Select buttons (or whatever Xbox calls them now) to open the game’s submenu and map, it uses the Bumper buttons for those tasks. Likewise the player’ character’s dodge ability (which is more like the rolling ability from 3D ‘Zelda’ games than a real dodge move) is mapped to X instead of the more standard B button. As a result, playing “Hatchwell” can cause conflicts with decades of control standards built into a player’s muscle memory… and there’s no option to rebind any of these keys into a more sane layout.
Story
“Hatchwell” is a fairly basic story about an ancient evil that has been sealed away finally breaking free, just in time for a hero to arise and put it down for good. The twist, however, is that the ancient evil is sealed away in the village of Hatchwell’s public well, and the hero is just a nobody from out-of-town.
The game’s entire plot takes place within the village and its immediate surroundings, all in the course of a single day, with each cleared dungeon causing time to move forward an hour (or so), as the villagers work on preparations for the annual Hatchwell festival, commemorating the last hero to seal away the ancient evil. Of course, our out-of-towner main character notices that there are all manner of small oddities occurring throughout the village – from a sudden proliferation of thorny vines, to a giant rabbit devouring the village’s fields, to an earthquake, to a sudden onset of trees losing their leaves – and starts investigating these occurrences, finding a mutant monster and mysterious gemstone at the site of each disturbance. The mayor and local blacksmith start to figure things out as well, with the deteriorating situation ultimately forcing the evacuation of the village by everyone except our hero.
In general, the storytelling in “Hatchwell” is pretty good, and I appreciated the division of the game into distinct ‘chapters’ for each dungeon, with the village’s NPCs always doing something different throughout the day . However, I feel like the localization from Philippino or Spanish into English isn’t quite up to par, often resulting in stilted dialog and somewhat bizarre turns of phrase (like every item-finding Steam Achievement having the title “That ________!” where the blank is the item name). Still, the script makes sense and is certainly better than most of the Engrish-based Japanese games of the NES era, so I can’t complain too much.
“Hatchwell” is not a particularly long game, clocking in at right around 12 hours for a complete playthrough. If the player is careful and doesn’t skip any of the demarcated “limited” side quests, it’s quite easy to do everything in one run, making replay value quite minimal as well. I found myself thinking that 12 hours was fairly short for a game that was so clearly trying to imitate “A Link to the Past,” but that game, in spite of how long it took me to finish it initially, can also be completed in around 12 hours by a seasoned player.
Gameplay
“Hatchwell” doesn’t just ‘seem’ like it’s inspired by classic 2D ‘Zelda’ games from the golden age: The developer flat-out admits it. As such, players will probably go in expecting to encounter puzzle-filled dungeons populated by a variety of monsters, mysterious items that grant permanent new abilities to the player, and boss monsters that can only be defeated by using one’s most-recently acquired item in clever ways.
That is exactly what “Hatchwell” offers.
The game features 7 distinct dungeons, along with several large, sprawling, non-dungeon caves to explore. Combat is largely a sword-based affair, with projectile weapons only coming into play for the last two dungeons. Bosses are a combination of pattern-memorization and tool usage puzzles that are, surprisingly, much trickier to figure out in the early game than they are by the end. Each defeated boss offers the player a heart container to expand their character’s health meter, while various side quests offer pet treats that do the same for the player’s animal companion.
Yes, “Hatchwell” features the bond between a human and a pet as part of its central gameplay… but does a generally poor job in executing this. The player and their pet (which can be one of several breeds of dog, several breeds of cat, or poultry) have separate health meters, but the pet’s ability to participate in combat is absolutely miserable. The pet has a long windup time for every attack, and throws itself at enemies in a very suicidal way, making its ‘help’ feel incredibly dubious. The player can freely toggle the pet between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ modes, with passive mode making the pet into nothing more than a cosmetic. The primary use for an active pet is not actually its self-destructive combat skills, but its ability to grab coins and health pickups dropped by slain enemies… or slain grass and bushes, with the former being the player’s primary source of coins and the latter being a source for health.
Aside from the misbegotten pet mechanics, the other novelty that “Hatchwell” bolts onto the well-established ‘Zelda’ Action/Adventure formula is the passage of time. Each of the first 6 bosses guards a Hatchwell Gem, and collecting one of these gems causes time to pass in the village. This not only causes some “limited” side quests to expire and NPCs to move on with their daily activities, but also allows plants to grow. It is, thus, possible to buy seedlings from the village’s greenhouse shop and plant them in a handful of soil patches scattered around town. Each time the day progresses, the player can harvest the old seedling and plant a new one, with options including mid-tier healing items for the player, mid-tier healing items for the pet, and a bag of 50 coins (protip: ONLY the player healing tuber is worthwhile).
In addition to the items found in dungeons that expand the player’s repertoire of moves, there are also a large number of magic rings (and a few amulets for the pet) hidden in locked, purple cylinders all over the game’s environs. Keys for these containers can be purchased from the village blacksmith shop, and it’s always a good idea to buy as many as possible to prevent needless backtracking through an optional cave upon discovering a lockbox while fresh out of keys. Most of the hidden rings add very (very) subtle effects to the player, to the point of feeling completely superfluous and irrelevant. Indeed, even after finding all of them, the only ring I ever bothered using was the one that increases the window of temporary invincibility after taking a hit. If these extra items were all passives that added their effects simultaneously, I would be more impressed with the system, but the way it stands, it’s not worth fiddling through the menus to change them for how minor their effects are.
Overall
Making an homage to the greatest Action/Adventure game of all time is a daunting task, requiring a thorough understanding of just what, exactly, makes such a game so good in the first place. “Hatchwell,” while not quite up to the standards of its inspiration, does an admirable job of capturing what gamers love about ‘Zelda’ games, primarily through its incredible dungeon design. While the story is adequate, the localization workable, and the presentation acceptable, games like this live or die by their mastery of gameplay design, which “Hatchwell” manages to do with only a few hitches that ultimately neither add nor subtract from the overall experience. If you like classic ‘Zelda’ games and have $10 burning a hole in your pocket, “Hatchwell” is the perfect game for you.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
