gretel and hansel 2 (flashpoint retrospective #2)

13 Mar, 2024

content warning: discussions of violence, fantastical body horror, child murder

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hello hello hello! you just couldn't keep away, could you? B)

today i am following through with my promises to write on G+H's sequel, the aptly named GRETEL AND HANSEL 2. if you haven't read my blog post on the first game yet, then who gives a darn i'm not your dad! do whatever you want.

a bit of Blogging Behind the Scenes (BBTS, as i have decided to start calling it): i've been fiddling around with inserting images into my blog posts, with moderate success. i've been using imgbb for free image hosting (would recommend, sign-up is not necessary) but i've been struggling to figure out how to align my pictures in the middle of my blog! if anyone has any suggestions on that maybe shoot me an email. realistically i'll figure it out myself (i've done an e-lit workshopping program in the past that definitely taught me how to do that at some point) but i've been unnecessarily resistant to diving into CSS, so that's probably hindering me quite a bit. OH, and also i settled on a theme for my blog!! quite bare bones but ngl that's how i like it. as much as i abhor it in interior decorating, i do tend to skew minimalist when it comes to my design sensitivities.

but enough about me!!! it's time to talk about today's edition of flashpoint archive, the flash game and animation retrospective. if i haven't made it clear already, all of the games that i am talking about are free to download and play via flashpoint archive. if you have even the slightest interest in any of the games i'm mentioning, please please PLEASE go check out flashpoint. you can play poptropica on there and everything!

G+H 2 is a biiiiig step-up from the first game, in terms of pretty much everything: horror, exploration, puzzles, death achievements, you name it. it even has a loading screen game! do you remember loading screen games??? i sure do, and boy do i miss 'em. this one features a bunch of character heads popping up, which you're meant to click on to rack up points and unlock in-game bandannas you can make gretel wear. it doesn't affect gameplay at all, it's just to look cute, and who am i to deny the importance of looking cute???

the game proper picks up with you having been dropped off in the forest by your good-for-nothing parents¹, and your trusty slingshot from the first game breaks as you try to shoot down a raven messing with your shiny homeward rock trail. sooooo, pretty poor start. and then you as the player are forced to manoeuvre gretel to fall down a painfully obvious pit trap in the ground. and so matters worsen!

what follows is easily one of my absolute favourite game sequences of any flash game ever. seeing as i'm unable to get images working to my liking right now, feel free to watch an excerpt of it here (it goes from 1:48 to 4:15, but it also shows the solution, so hold off from watching in case you don't want spoilers). i'll also recap it here, mostly because i'm obsessed with this scene and i want to gush about it. so when you hit the bottom of the pit, you fall into a chair, which grows vines that lash you to it and make it impossible to escape. three other kids are here, in various levels of harm: one is a shaking little boy who acts as your warning system for this section of the game, one is a very dead girl whose body sags if you interact with it, and the third is a tree-child who is in a particularly horrific ambiguous state of sentience.

the tremulous boy is excited to see you there, as he assumes you will be saving them from some sort of tree monster. as you are rapidly tied to the chair, he realises this is not the case. then enters a towering pipe-smoking tree fellow, one who insists on playing restaurant with you as he takes your gut-turning order. things on the menu include acorns, a fish salad, and... human remains! eating plant matter (as our new friend warns us) turns you slowly but surely into another twisted tree-child. eating anything else makes you sick. and refusing to eat anything will incur the tree man's wrath, who will kill the remaining survivors of his dinner in your stead.

another tree-based kids' horror setting comes to mind. in the girl who circumnavigated fairyland in a ship of her own making by catherynne m. valente, the protagonist september flees death's domain, the proximity to her own demise slowly turning her more and more tree-like. the horror of her guts and skin turning into bark and twig has stuck with me for years. similar body horror happens with the protagonist of frances hardinge's cuckoo song. body horror is always so cool and so agitating to me, doubly so when it's about kids, and triply so when i was a kid and reading about it.

this section is entirely unlike the other adventure-puzzle sections of G+H 1. instead, you have to play a balancing act between your stomach and your new friends and your life. it's a fantastic way of emphasising the status quo change (especially when accompanied by the breaking of your beloved slingshot from game the first), and it's phenomenal at disarming the player and encouraging them to keep their wits about them. i won't give away the answer to the puzzle here either in case you want to play it for yourselves, and man would i recommend you play it for yourselves. i'll have to restrain myself from talking about any other scares in the game (mostly so you have the opportunity to discover them yourselves), but trust me when i say it is INTENSE, especially for a game that is ostensibly for kids. as an example, the game also includes graphic depictions of domestic abuse, domestic violence, and subsequent murder.

beyond its horror, G+H 2 is sprawling, which is SO impressive for a game that only needs a computer and an internet connection to play. you wander constantly back and forth over the map, collecting abilities and coins, solving puzzles, unlocking new deaths, and so on. it isn't even the only one of its kind, at that! games like endeavor (zillix) or elephant quest (jmtb02) featured massive worlds that opened up more and more as you progressed. it's far more remarkable to me that G+H 2 was less an exception and more a rule to exploratory flash game worlds. it's yet another testament to the passion of game devs to create such extensive worlds for free, and by extension a testament to the importance of the work that flashpoint's developers do. genuinely it is getting me emotional to think about haha

if i were to talk about the WHOLE game, it would take me forever!!!! or at least it'd take me much longer than i have the time or desire to do. honestly if you want to get more information on the game, just go ahead and download flashpoint and try it out for yourself! i guarantee you that you'll have a far better time than any old blog post floating about on the internet would give you :P

thanks for swinging by again! i hope i've convinced at least one of you to give G+H 2 a shot (and tbh it is so fine if you only play the sequel, you honestly don't miss much LMAO). stay frosty, i'll see you in the next week (or more) (or less) with a newwwww post B)

-aries

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