Where to start with a game like Horace? Maybe with how it's one of the year's finest games, and definitely its most overlooked. A sprawling, cinematic and ever-inventive 2D platformer - and puzzle game, and old-school arcade racer, and pixelart first-person shooter and about half a dozen other things it morphs into over its 20-hour running time - it's a lyrical flight of fancy that could only ever, really, have been made in the industrial town of Sittingbourne, Kent (or Shittingbourne, as it's affectionately known by locals).
Maybe it's best to start with Paul Helman, the developer behind the art, design, music, gameplay, writing and promotion of a project that's taken him some seven years to complete (with help from programmer Sean Scaplehorn). Horace is Helman, and Helman is Horace - a cauldron of pop-culture references and fondness for 16-bit classics, he's both classy and chaotic. At last weekend's EGX, his lanky frame hovered around the Horace stand dressed in an impeccable three-piece tweed suit and neatly polished tan brogues, all set off by a tatty Sainsbury's bag he kept constantly by his side. Here, in both Horace and in Helman, is a proper English eccentric.
Work began on Horace some seven years ago, though Helman's own story begins a little earlier than that; at the age of 17, he got his first job in the industry at Croydon-based Probe, working on some of its most high profile licensed games.
from Eurogamer.net
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