Hank: Straightjacket: the interrogation of the time-rewinding vigilante

Born as a dialogue test for the studio's main game, the drunken, time-traveling hero got a story of his own — still in early access.

A washed-up drunk under interrogation

The villain of Hank: Straightjacket doesn't just want to be rid of his prisoner: first he has to work out how that washed-up drunk derailed so many of his plans. This interrogation — the Unraveler against Hank, the time-traveling vigilante — is what holds the whole story together, told in short scenes that resolve by pointing and clicking your way through the scene itself. You go in expecting to solve escape puzzles, and you discover that the interrogation is the escape: to get out, Hank rewinds his own time and turns what he already knows of the future against the man who captured him, while the game lets him talk and act on the scene at once, so that whoever is on the other side reacts to what Hank has just done rather than to what the script already saw coming. The framing is comic-book, and the game's own listing files it under adventure, stealth and third-person camera — a combination it never explains, and that hangs there as part of the puzzle.

The origin sits in that same store description: the team at My Next Games was testing a dialogue system that wouldn't interrupt the action, meant for the studio's main game, Hank: Drowning on Dry Land, and liked the result so much that it decided to release the experiment as a title of its own. Straightjacket remains in early access — fitting for something that never stopped being a prototype at heart.

A puzzle sealed inside one room

The game is tiny and still barely played, and those who took a chance on it at GOG — a store that is also carrying the title — came away with the same near-unanimous thumbs up. It proves nothing on any real scale; it is only what exists so far, and it is worth less as a statistic than as a sign that nobody who went in came out regretting it.

Anyone who likes a short session solved by pointing and clicking, and doesn't mind running into early-access rough edges, has a puzzle sealed inside one room here: you go in, you hear the Unraveler's interrogation, and you come out. Anyone hoping for a brain-teaser the size of the studio's main game will feel the prototype under the comic-book veneer — because that is what Straightjacket always was, before it earned a name of its own.