Helheim Hassle

Review by Gaming Masterpieces - The greatest games of all time on Steam.
Is this game a masterpiece? Yes, it is one of the funniest puzzle platformers I played in a long time. The platforming part is not too challenging, it is more important to know where and when to jump. Or where to throw your body parts.
Bjørn is a Viking boy, but he hates fighting and pillaging. While trying to avoid another brutal fight, he falls to his death and accidently kills a large bear on the way. So he immideately gets the name of Bjørn, the Bear Slayer and goes to Viking Heaven, a place called Valhalla. Valhalla means fighting and killing all day long. For Bjørn this is hell, he would love to go to Viking hell, a calm place called Helheim. Many years after his death, he gets a chance to go to Helheim. Resurrected, he joins a funny guy on his quest to get a sword from Helheim with the promise to stay in Helheim afterwards. Lying around in the forest for a long time, Bjørn's body is decayed and he can throw his limbs (head, arm, leg) around at will, controlling them seperatly and reaching places that are inaccessible to his whole body. He can also reattach his body parts again, as long as he finds them. Or he can combine them in strange ways, like a head with an arm. Most puzzles require you to use your body parts in funny ways.
Dying is possible, but you are resurrected a few seconds later. The dialogues come with professionally voice-overs, gamepad is supported, ultrawidescreen as well.
The same devs made the game Manual Samuel before, which has the same kind of humor but had some (slightly) difficult action sequences, I never managed to win the final bossfight. Helheim has far more puzzles, but also easier action sequences.
Conclusion:
Puzzle game with funny conversations, odd characters and some (mostly) easy platforming parts.

Honestly, I too would want to escape Valhalla if I was forced to be on an Esports team.
The creators of Manuel Samuel is back with another game! And just with how Manuel Samuel was a unique adventure will humor surrounding Samuel’s unfortunate situation, so is Helheim Hassle. And fun fact, Helheim Hassle and Manuel Samuel takes place in the same universe and even on the same day.
Helheim Hassle brings us to a young teenage Viking named Bjorn Hammerparty who isn’t like his Viking brethren. Unlike everyone else, he is a pacifist. He doesn’t want to go out fighting so he makes sure he doesn’t get into a situation where he has to and he sure doesn’t want to go to Valhalla. However, during a battle that is sure to wipe out his whole village, Bjorn gets into a fatal accident while he was running to his hideout. The sketchy bridge he was crossing may have made him fall straight onto a bear. Once Bjorn comes to, he’s a ghost and his body is limbless. Before moving on, Bjorn attaches his limbs back on his body and talks to Modgunn to be granted passage into Helheim. However, his cowardly fall to his death was counted as him heroically killing a bear without a weapon and is brought into Valhalla by the Allfather.
And that’s where Bjorn stayed for centuries. That is until Pesto comes across his body and resurrects him since Pesto can’t read Old Norse to get through the door to Helheim. It doesn’t take that long for them to find out that Bjorn’s limbs can detach from his body, make a deal with Pesto so Bjorn can enter and hopefully stay in Helheim, and find out that Helheim is getting a bit of a renovation. That renovation being a bunch of puzzles being installed along the road to Helheim that is strangely perfect for Bjorn’s situation. Though, Bjorn’s absence in Valhalla doesn’t go unnoticed. Mostly because the Allfather is very into shooters and Bjorn is his team’s healer. Well, this sure will be a hassle! A Helheim Hassle (haha, okay I’ll see myself out).
So to get all the way to Helheim and ask Hel if Bjorn can stay, you’ll need to use Bjorn’s new ability to use. At first, you’re only able to detach one or two limbs, along with the puzzles starting out easy, to get used to how each limb controls and so you’re already prepped to think about how you’ll get your limbs up there rather than your whole body. As you progress, more are unlocked until you can detach and move every limb. Each limb have their own way of moving, how it’ll affect the main body, and how it’ll affect the movement of a group of joined limbs. Your arms are great for climbing, legs are great for running and jumping, and a head, well, is just a heavy blob that weighs your body down. When you’re combining limbs, or detaching them, you’ll need to think about these aspects. If you need to jump high and climb, for example, you’ll need to combine a leg and an arm.
The puzzles here mainly revolve around this unique mechanic as you need to maneuver your body parts to the needed pressure points to open doors so you can take your whole body through. There are also situations where you need your head or your arm as you need to read or grab something as part of the puzzle. Finding those gaps that your limbs can squeeze through, or figuring out what limbs you need to send, so the pressure points can be pressed. Throwing your limbs around in cases where it’s just too high for you to jump to. Or even figuring out the sequence you need to send out your limbs to so you can open up an opportunity so you can get the other limbs there or to release them in cases where they’re trapped. Later on, you’ll be tasked with bringing specific limbs to pressure points, making it harder as a result. There are also a couple puzzles that emphasis speed, but they are few and far between.
I also can’t write a review and not mention the immense amount of extra content. If you’re just going straight from beginning to end, just doing the puzzles and quests you need to do to continue, you’re pretty much missing most of the game. Even if you are doing some extra things along the way, you’re still missing a lot. There are a lot of optional puzzles that you can find, optional notes scattered around, berry bushes hidden in places you can either easily reach or barely reach, side quests galore, races, and a whole convention where you can fund and play game parodies. Though, it’s important to not get hold up if you’re stuck on a particular side quest. Doing the optional puzzles will often lead you to chests with gold or soul coins that you can spend and berries can be made into smoothies so you can gain abilities to help you. Luckily, the map does let you see if you got everything in an area. There are also one time things that you can only do once so you’ll need to at least play twice if you’re planning to get every achievement.
Also for anyone that’s going to pick this up, you do get notified of a point of no return, but it’s only until you finish ending sequence. You’re brought back so you can get anything you missed once you complete the game, so no need to worry.
The humor will, of course, be hit or miss. Even more so than the humor in Manual Samuel. Here, the humor is more around the Allfather being an announcer tryhard dude, Pesto mispronouncing everything (and I swear it’s on purpose) and cringing at everything, breaking the fourth wall to make fun of the game itself, and putting humor with Bjorn’s situation. Most of the humor did hit for me, with some even growing on me as I progressed through, but Pesto never grew on me.
Verdict
Helheim Hassle may have went with a different style of humor that is kind of annoying, but the game itself is solid. When I went into the game, I just expected a straightforward game akin to Manuel Samuel, but instead we get a game filled with a bunch of stuff to do and explore. The puzzles are well designed, this unique mechanic works pretty well with how it was implemented, I adored most of the characters (not you Pesto) and the art style is great as always. It may also help to know that you don’t necessarily need to play Manuel Samuel before this one as there are only a few references to loosely connect the two games. If you loved Manual Samuel and/or love puzzle platformers, Helheim Hassle is definitely worth it. I really hope Perfectly Paranormal will come back with another title.
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Do you want to solve cool "puzzels" in a beautiful atmosphere wile laughing your ass off? Then this game is something for
you!
I can honestly say that i haven't laughed this hard while playing a game in years! (In a good way) The witty dialog and the whole story in it self is worth the by if you ask me. Solid 10/10

Bought the game to support the developer since i really liked Manual Samuel, but got to say this was a disappointment with the constant puzzles. Yeah they were cool the first 10 times then when they started to get timed it gets annoying. Story was nice, characters are funny, nice tie in with the first game. Worth buying, but beware the puzzles get annoying fast.

I was only expecting a decent game, but this is actually a great puzzle platformer with several hours of entertainment and only very minor issues. I loved it. If you enjoy puzzles and/or platformers, this is money well spent.
The Good:
The core game mechanic is original and works really well. It felt the right amount of challenging without being frustrating, and that includes tightly parametrized body parts and combinations that never made me feel like I was fighting the engine instead of the puzzle. There was also plenty of side content, requiring the player to backtrack, but the fast travel mechanic was so snappy and unobtrusive I was never really bored.
The humor is great. It took a short while to grow on me at the beginning, because it's so aggressively silly, but once I got into it I really appreciated all the little references. I felt adequately pandered to by the unsubtle mockery of other indie games. Bjorn is an adorable protagonist, and all the other characters were charismatic and/or funny; I was invested in their story. Props to the voice actors; this game has really good, professional voice acting, which is sometimes not the case with the works of smaller studios (and it makes a big difference, at least for me).
I like that this game has meaningful choices that affect your progress on a higher level.
I don't want to overlook the graphic design. The aesthetic is great, clean and consistent. Bjorn's facial expressions are well synchronized.
The Less Good:
None of these quibbles should hinder your enjoyment of the game very much (they didn't for me).
The in-game menu system could have used some more polish. It annoyed me greatly that whenever I opened it (by pressing 'select'-equivalent on my controller) it never seemed to default to the tab I wanted (which was almost always the map). Quest updates took too long to be marked as 'read' due to an unnecessarily slow fade-in effect. On the other hand, letters didn't have such a system at all, making it confusing to keep track of which ones I had read. They didn't even say which one you'd just picked up!
Speaking of the (Balder's) letters, I was very indifferent to these. I appreciate the desire to make your collectibles 'useful', but the letters were a lot of black and white text to read in an otherwise very visual game. The smoothies are a much better idea, even though the descriptions for some of them are vague and I'm not entirely sure what they did for me.
Highlighting the body part targetted by merge/pick up but not the currently selected one leads to a lot of confusion when cycling through separated body parts that are next to each other. I wish cycling body parts highlighted them too, in a different way (only until you move).
I'm normally not a fan of timed puzzles. I'm *especially* not a fan of timed puzzles in a game that involves complicated disassembling and reassembling of your body requiring the full d-pad, analog stick and three additional buttons. It's hard to do on a deadline, and boy were they tight. Fortunately this mechanic wasn't used often, and was usually optional (Erika). On the other hand, I didn't find the couple of times I was forced to do this nearly as frustrating as other players seem to report.
On that subject, I like that the final sequence can be made easier by the choices you made along the game. However, it feels like some of those choices were presented in a dishonest manner--the player doesn't know he has a choice at that moment, and is "tricked" into following the "bad" path (like when you set a certain building on fire, or the importance of petting critters). At first I assumed you could "undo" every accidental bad choice by making amends, and I would have loved if that was the case, but at this time I'm not entirely sure.
Which leads to: At the time of writing, I have completed the main story and the vast majority of the side content. But there are a few things for which I just have absolutely no idea where to even begin looking. For example, I still can't see in dark places (I haven't been able to do this other than in the prologue, because Bjorn apparently forgot how to pick up torches when he died). Sure, I could ask in the forum, but I shouldn't have to!
Conclusion:
Good job. The core of the game is nearly flawless. Any issues with the menus could easily be patched away. I would be happy to buy a sequel or another game made by this studio in the future if the genre and aesthetic are to my liking.

Controls take a while to get used to, but after the initial hassle you'll be good to go. Truly a bizarre title with good puzzles, odd characters and cool ass voice-actors.
Arne Axeteeth is my spirit animal.
It's a big step-up from Manual Samuel, which is Perfectly Paranormal's first release.. and they also hid some easy to spot easter-eggs in there for you if you have played Manual Samuel aswell. If you haven't.. you might just have to play that one aswell!

A must play!
This game will take you on an adventure through solving puzzles and great storytelling. It manages the fine art of balancing challenges, witty banter with beautifull visuals that will hold on to your attention. Even if platform games have exsisted since forever Helheim hassle manages to reinvent it in a good way with specialized game mechanics. It brings back memories from blizzards Lost vikings but much more well done and more compelling storytelling. I'd recommend it any day of the week