Hela Preview: Stuart Little takes on the Nordic wilderness

The two Unravel games, released in 2016 and 2018 respectively, are among the cosiest games I know, and the latter in particular deserves a lot of attention for the brilliant co-op that was offered with several really clever puzzles and challenges, as well as for having unique Nordic environments. So, what does this have to do with Hela? Well, it's mostly the same people behind this adventure too, and it's once again innovative co-op that's on the menu, but this time in three freely explorable dimensions.

In Hela, we get to experience the world through the eyes of a little mouse, along with up to three other companion mice. I recently attended a presentation of Hela and checked out lots of gameplay, which made me eager to get started with the adventure, which again has a clear Nordic flavour. The story was only superficially described and revolves around a kind witch who has become ill and needs help. The impression I got is that this is mostly an excuse to have fun with other players in a very open adventure.

The whole game can be played alone or with up to four people, and seems to have several challenges with solutions that require more than one person. However, this is easily solved by creating a clone of yourself when needed, which means that you can pull heavy objects, lift things up, and help each other in all sorts of ways.

The great gameplay feature of Hela is that your little mouse protagonist wears a frog backpack (a bag that looks like a frog), which can both extend its tongue to work like the grappling hook in the Just Cause games, or even inflate to allow you to glide. The game is clearly physics-based in a way reminiscent of the aforementioned Just Cause, and there are seemingly a multitude of ways to solve problems and explore things.

For example, one person can glide and a second person can hang on via their frog's tongue, and you can even attach the frog's tongue to objects and drag them to wherever you want. The tongues can also be used to pick up objects, climb on things, hitchhike with a running hare, and to swing around like Tarzan in the seemingly open game world.

All of this looks genuinely fun and I can imagine it will lead to a lot of laughter and curiosity as you work with friends to find alternative solutions, reach hard-to-access places, or find clever secrets. One thing that struck me, however, was that the developer, Windup, decided to design the frog tongue as a "transparent" object. So, the tongue has no actual collision programming and can slide through things, be it the bodies of animals you hitchhike upon, and so on. As far as a gameplay choice goes, it's probably the correct decision to allow for more flexible use, but it's still worth mentioning as a small and unexpected element.

Thanks to this, there's seemingly nothing to slow down the playful gameplay where you can whizz between dense northern forests, banter with each other, swing through the trees, explore houses, and have some fun with the things you find, be it a football, a toolbox, or something else. The puzzles also often seem to be physics-based where insects can, for instance, block the way to something. This can be overcome if you drag away some coffee to distract them. In other cases, you have to lift objects and can use your frog tongue in ingenious ways to move heavy objects in a way that small mice could not otherwise do.

Whether there is combat is something we don't yet know, but Windup says that not all animals are our friends - at least not initially - which makes me suspect that they may have to be defeated, rescued, or a favour completed for them before you can befriend, say, a magpie.

What strikes me about Hela is how well Windup has captured the nature and surroundings of this slice of the world. The music also comes from the same folk music group that was behind Unravel, which hopefully means that it will be a memorable soundtrack.

The only concern I have from what we've seen so far is that Hela seems to be based more on players having fun together than the adventure actually presenting an engaging challenge. It's possible that the snippet of the game we saw isn't entirely representative of the wider whole, but a clear narrative and clear objectives to overcome help with the sense of getting somewhere and presenting meaning, and I hope that's something that's delivered in the full experience, which hopefully won't be too far away given how finished it looked.