Him & Her Collection – Review

Him & Her Collection promises us 3 games full of taxing world flipping puzzles as you work to reunite Him & Her.

When you first start up Him & Her Collection, you’re greeted with the main menu giving you the choice between Him & Her, Her Challenges (Him & Her 2) and finally Him & Her 3.
Each game offers a choice between Easy & Hard, before you set out across ~30 levels to reunite the loving couple.

Starting off on easy, initially you’ll only have to walk a few steps, to take Him into Her arms and get a small celebratory love heart before moving onto the next level, you’ll soon have to make a few jumps, and as your target gets increasingly more difficult to reach.
Thankfully you have the ability to flip the world, by walking to the edge of a platform, with simple 90-degree angles, walking to an edge will take you round onto the next face, flipping the world by 90 degrees.

It’s all pretty straight forward and you’ll likely reach the halfway point of Him & Her within about 10-15 minutes, as you’re given new puzzles to solve such as switches making new platforms appear, and spike traps that you need to jump over or avoid.

Her Challenges follows the very similar path, but this time, you’re in control of Her as you search for Him, with Her Challenges (also known as Him & Her 2) there’s quite a drastic jump in difficulty, and it’s more of a continuation of the first game rather than a standalone experience, if you jump straight into Her Challenges, you’ll likely struggle to pass the first few levels, so it’s well worth getting familiar with the gameplay mechanics on the first game, before starting on the much more challenging sequel.
Onto Him & Her 3 and things go full circle, the easy levels on the 3rd game are as simple as (if not more so) than the first game and some feel far too familiar, making the learning curve more like a rollercoaster.

It’s difficult to call the 3 titles individual games, as they’re so similar and neither really adds anything new. Sure, there’s platforms you can move side to side, but ultimately, you’re doing exactly the same thing time and time again.
Unfortunately, this does mean Him & Her (The collection, not just a single game) starts to feel pretty repetitive quite quickly.
Thankfully with 25-30 levels in each game, and some really tough challenges, there’s enough game here, but Hard mode is a missed opportunity as you’re simply given a time limit to retread old ground, rather than more traps or more difficult maps.

Graphically, as you’ll see from the screenshots, it’s all very plain, grey background, black walls and floors with Him & Her both White. It makes the characters pretty easy to spot, but quite often you’ll struggle to see those spikes you’ve just jumped into for the 3rd time.
Playing through the games, you are going to die quite a lot, and there’s a strong sense of trial and error, however there’ll be more than a few occasions when you die because of the game and not a personal mistake.
While there’s an option to “restart level” in the pause menu, it seems to take a few seconds too long to retry when you do die, (and you will, a lot).

You’ll often have to jump from the edge of a platform, but when controls aren’t as responsive as they could be, you’re just as likely to flip around that platform into spikes, and that jump you need to make, might mean narrowly missing spikes, which isn’t always easy when control in the air can feel quite sluggish at times too.

Sound is another very thin area, with a melodic background theme which isn’t too bad, but there’s really nothing else worth turning the volume up for.
The main saving grace is the price. Whether you want to call it 3 games, or a single title with 3 parts, there’s still a lot of puzzling gameplay to work through for only £3.29, even if you tire of it after a few hours, there’s still enough enjoyment at the price of a Big Mac to make Him & Her Collection worth considering.

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