Remember the mimics from Prey, those creepy masses of tentacles that could disguise themselves as shoes and coffee cups so they could get the drop on you? Henry Halfhead is kind of like that, except instead of using its everyday objects for jumpscares, it uses them to tell a story about the value of play.
It’s never explained why the game’s titular character is just the top half of a human head, or why they have the power to jump inside the objects around them. There’d be ample opportunity to do so–the game’s story and the player’s actions are charmingly narrated, which lends meaning to your actions and helps you know what to do in the various little sandboxes you find yourself in. You play as Henry from childhood to old age, possessing various items to solve puzzles or meet goals.
As a baby and child, those goals are mostly mischief and creative play: coloring, making music, or stacking blocks. (I also couldn't resist the opportunity to recreate that shapes-in-slots meme.) You have to open presents before your parents catch you or rescue confiscated toys from a high shelf. Having to possess objects to move them is enjoyably clunky and lets you be creative with how you go about things, even if the game is ultimately pretty straightforward in its goals. In the scenes where Henry’s a young, it definitely encourages a kind of chaotic play that captures the childhood sensation of having a bunch of stuff and just smashing it all together.
For me, all of this faltered a bit in the back half of the game, which follows Henry as an adult. The narration tells you that Henry’s lost that childhood playfulness, living a routine, somewhat overwhelming life of going to work and coming home, and putting aside his enjoyment of creative hobbies like music and art. But given the game’s length (it took me about three hours) and the fact that the core mechanic remains the same throughout, I didn’t really feel a difference between the play the game idolizes and Henry’s adult life. Yeah, he has a boring job sorting packages, but you still move those packages by possessing them and hopping around. There’s plenty of trouble you can cause and creative stuff you can get up to, which does mesh with the game’s ultimate message about how play can be found anywhere, even when the narration insists it doesn’t. It also felt odd to me that a video game would be telling such a story–if you’re old enough to resonate with its warning not to lose sight of fun, you’re an adult playing a video game, who clearly already knows the lesson the story is trying to impart.
But even given this clash (I want to write “ludonarrative dissonance” here, but I will bravely abstain), the adult Henry scenes have their own kind of fun that’s distinct from the childhood ones. Cooking becomes a slapstick challenge when you have to be the knife and the food and the pan; plunging the toilet, checking the mail, or taking a bath are multi-step affairs.
Even when the story the game wants to tell through words didn’t quite feel like the story it was telling through play, I appreciated its message and found new things to enjoy in its mechanics. I liked the gentle, often funny narration, even when I disagreed with it or it felt a bit heavy-handed. I played solo, but there’s also a co-op mode, and it feels like a game an adult could play with a kid and they’d both get something out of it, which can be hard to find.
Henry Halfhead is out now for PC, Switch, and PS5.
