Will Willis and the Temple of Hacha'Kyum

2D platformers have the ability to keep players engaged even today, in spite of the fact that there are much more complex games out there with entire worlds to explore from a first-person perspective and a huge lore to experience along the way. However, the challenge of passing a particularly difficult level can be very addictive.

Will Willis and the Temple of Hacha'Kyum is a 2D platformer designed for a game jam competition, in which you play the role of an archaeologist trying to escape from a temple. Naturally, the said temple is full of nasty traps and seemingly impassable terrain, but there’s always a way to make it through if you have enough patience to try every possibility.

There’s not much of a story to worry about, given the fact that the game was designed in a matter of hours, but platformers are fun regardless of whether they feature a story or not. In short, the goal is to reach the end of each level and avoid dying along the way, although there’s no actual penalty, except for the fact that you have to restart the stage from the beginning and do it all over again.

As always, it’s important that the character responds quickly and accurately to your input, otherwise the frustration is too much to deal with. Thankfully, that’s not a problem with Will Willis and the Temple of Hacha'Kyum, although there is a slight delay when it comes to the jump command. Other than that, there’s nothing your character can do anyway, so simplicity is a strength in this case.

The graphics are not bad either, especially when you consider the short development period and the small team behind the game. Granted, the textures get repetitive after a while, but then again you don’t really have time to notice them that much. Thus, survival is more important most of the time, especially since almost every jump is pretty difficult to pull off properly.

In the end, Will Willis and the Temple of Hacha'Kyum runs pretty smoothly and it looks quite well at the same time, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the genre. Hence, it’s a basic jump ‘n’ run that features spikes, gaps and the occasional wall-jump sections.